


Planet Megalodon Wraith Defense Force

by pentapus



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, There are a lot of John/Rodney feels in this, a little light h/c with your action adventure, also some OT3, but it is definitely gen, pre-Ronon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:02:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/pseuds/pentapus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John was just going to have to accept that his dignity was a necessary sacrifice for Rodney’s peace of mind. </p><p>Or -- the one with the sharks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Planet Megalodon Wraith Defense Force

**Author's Note:**

> Set in early season 2. Intended for sga_flashfic’s “Shark!!!1” challenge, but I failed at deadlines. Thanks to ltlj for the beta and for helping me keep up my determination to finish this thing. And to thetruebard who wouldn't let me get away with a less than perfect ending.

“How many times do I have to say: DO NOT THROW AWAY THE POTENTIALLY INVALUABLE ANCIENT ARTIFACTS,” Rodney seethed.

It had given him a sort of brain itch as he walked by, a square foot of matte black psuedo-plastic, folded neatly in the bottom of a storage bin--one of the new people had mistaken it for Ancient packing material--before he came to his senses and snatched it to safety.

“That’s the unidentified material box, actually,” Simpson said icily from behind a laptop and a cowering chemist. “The trash is over by the door.”

Rodney harrumphed expertly. “As if I have time to spend on the flawed organizational systems of morons,” he said but fondly because his attention was on the Ancient diagrams blossoming across the touch-sensitive screen. “Oh, _oh_.”

The gold gleam of the Ancient characters was so delightful that even Simpson unfroze enough to admit, “But we didn’t think it could do _that_ ,” before Rodney was shouting over the radio for Zelenka. Initial tests showed that the screen responded only to gene carriers (Rodney didn’t even have to call dibs) and was unable to display whole sections of the Ancient database to which the diagrams seemed to correspond. About an hour in, Rodney unlocked the schematics of the control room consoles and everybody got really excited.

Realistically, Rodney had to admit that the square seemed to have poorer access to the database than the expedition laptops and lacked the--admittedly imperfect--translating programs that helped the non-linguists interpret the complicated Ancient grammar. But it was still neat.

The other plus--besides having an Ancient palm pilot to play with--came when he took the database square to the briefing room, and it proved to be one piece of Ancient technology that John Sheppard couldn’t operate. Though it would be inaccurate to suggest that _nothing_ happened when the Colonel tried to navigate the displayed directories.

“It’s a portable database terminal!” Rodney announced proudly. In the next chair, Zelenka did his usual hmming and hawing and was otherwise unsatisfactorily supportive.

“Default screen does appear to display table of contents very similar to database, though is in different form than we have seen previous--”

“Yes, yes, fine, the handheld version is designed to be more easily navigable than the stationary versions,” Rodney said and poked helpfully at one bubble in the web diagram labeled “Cool! Puddlejumper controls!” in Ancient which was when Sheppard suddenly got interested and tried to poke a bubble of his own. He got an immediate response. Sort of.

“John?” Elizabeth sounded worried, leaping out of her seat to peer across the table. Rodney might admit, later, to an instant of coldness in the chest region, but he'd probably caught a cold bug somewhere.

“Oh my,” said Zelenka.

“Huh,” Rodney said, taking back the square. “That’s funny.”

Sheppard was blinking slowly up at him from the floor, his chair rolling sedately away from where he had fallen out of it. “The hell?” Sheppard said, grabbing the edge of the table. The effects, it seemed, were extremely fleeting.

“You fainted,” Rodney said and, as an afterthought, beamed. “Try again.” He shoved the square back at him. Sheppard started. When his fingers brushed one black corner, he let out a shuddering breath and folded to the floor. Rodney stared, impressed. 

“If you do that again,” Sheppard said mildly when he woke up the second time, only a moment later.

“Rodney!” Elizabeth again.

“You are astonishing,” Zelenka said with feeling.

“Okay, okay--where are you going, Colonel? Beckett.” He jerked a thumb towards the infirmary. Because there was no reason to be completely stupid about it.

“I have no idea,” Carson said, resigned, when he had Sheppard perched on the edge of a cot, submitting to medically minded prodding with Rodney bouncing at his shoulder. Elizabeth was on radio and Zelenka had vanished back to the lab.

“Not surprised,” Rodney said, cradling the square happily, folded up and conveniently palm sized. He tapped it against the back of Carson’s hand. Carson gave a tiny shriek, leaping away from the bed. “See? You’re fine. It shouldn’t do that.” Sheppard looked amused for all of two seconds before Rodney said, “Maybe--” and frowned at him.

Sheppard saw this one coming, finally, and jumped up in time to crumple onto the floor instead of the bed.

“God damnit, McKay!” he snapped, perfectly healthy as soon as Rodney took the square away from his skin.

“Rodney!” Carson said, which was getting repetitive, really.

“Fine. If you want to impede important scientific research--” Rodney lifted his chin and stomped out of the infirmary.

**

“You’ve been cleared for off world travel?” Elizabeth inquired politely, standing at bottom of the steps, hands clasped in front of her.

“Sure. As long as Rodney keeps that damn thing away from me.” John smiled tightly at the scientist fiddling with his tac vest a few feet away in front of the gate. 

“Oh, sure, blame me--" Rodney started.

“Thanks,” John said, “I will.”

Rodney glared, struggling with a retort. John could hear Zelenka trying to argue with him over the radio: “Is portable database terminal--does not contain the information within itself. Once stargate is closed, connection is severed.”

Rodney gave John once last glare before he turned away, waving his hands in emphatic gestures completely invisible to his audience. John wondered if he should be narrating for Zelenka’s benefit. “Yes, yes, useless off world. Brilliant theorizing. However, some scientists believe in the power of experimentation.”

“Rodney, is too valuable. Play with it later. Perhaps on safe world that has been cleared by Marines?”

Rodney sniffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “You have no sense of adventure.”

“Neither do you! Now go away. You distract entire lab when you annoy me.”

John choked down a laugh. Beside him, Teyla smiled more sincerely. “We are prepared?”

“As we’ll ever be.” He gave Rodney a painful slap on the back under the cover of manly bonding.

“Ow ow ow!” Rodney said, and John gave the guy up at the DHD a cheerful thumbs up.

**

They stepped through the gate into warm, humid air and a light drizzle. John shivered once when the wet hit the back of his neck. The gate stood on a rise around wooded hills. He could see ocean in the distance over the rise and fall of the trees.

“It is an island,” Teyla said, turning a slow circle, hand on her gun. John turned with her and sure enough, could see glimpses of that same distant water in all directions. 

“Islands,” Rodney corrected, pointing absently at the smudges of rocky shore rising from the water, already whipping out the life signs detector. 

“Been here before?” John looked at Teyla.

“I have never visited this place.” She frowned. John waited, expecting elaboration after a face like that.

“Nothing else?”

“What? No, Colonel.” She added vaguely, “I am fine,” which since John hadn’t been asking about at all, he filed away for later.

“Hmm? Yes, of course you are. This way,” Rodney said, taking two steps toward a faint path and blinking expectantly at John.

So John said, “Righty-o,” and they headed off, following the path along the ridgeline, sloping gently into a forest of thin trees and brush.

“Life signs,” Rodney was muttering, “some anomalous energy readings. Not the signs of an advanced culture. Remnants?” He started poking at the screen, each poke accompanied by a musical, “Not a ZPM, not a ZPM, not a ZPM...”

“Hey, what’s this?” John asked, taking two quick running steps up a jutting rock to peer through the trees. 

“What’s what?” McKay asked absently.

“It looks like a hole. Like somebody’s filling in a big hole.” John pointed at a flat expanse in the vallley between the hills. It looked a little like a plowed field sunk half a dozen feet into the ground, a torn up rectangle of bare earth. “Down that ridge, by the shoreline.” 

“Huh,” Mckay said, joining him. He eyed the scanner. “Life signs. I don’t see anything that looks particularly human.” 

“I see a path,” Teyla said, looking through the field glasses. “If this one joins it, we should be at the shore before too long.”

“Hey, good idea,” John said generously, meaning the field glasses. Rodney gave him one of those looks that meant he was wondering how John ever got promoted.

Farther down the path along the ridge, there was another gap in the trees. “Hole,” John called and then, consulting the field glasses, “People working on the hole!”

“We’re actually on the other side of a ridge from the last one. The ‘holes’,” McKay wiggled two fingers in skeptical air quotes, “are clustered at the shore there. There may be a river or a bay that we can’t see. Energy readings still nil. If they’re--” he squinted down at the spread of fresh dirt, “planting crops? Over the hole? They’re doing it manually.”

“Well, what do you think? Should we wave?” John hooked a thumb into the edge of his vest.

“Let’s not,” Mckay suggested. He’d pulled out his own field glasses.

“I doubt that they could see us,” Teyla said. John glanced at her; she was wincing.

“What?” he protested. “It wasn’t that bad an idea!”

“Oh my god,” Rodney said suddenly, looking through the glasses. “We’re in Riven.”

John said, “Wait what?” just as Teyla said, “You have heard of this place before, Dr. McKay?”

**

After Rodney discovered the flimsy bridges connecting the islands and John made his usual ineffective attempt to explain the genre of computer puzzle games, they headed back down the path, perhaps stepping a little faster because they knew there were people at the end of it or just because John had started to think, hey, maybe this was sort of interesting. 

A few minutes later, the path jagged unexpectedly to the right, a brush of wind bringing with it the smell of salt and cooler air. They began to hear the thump of waves against rock, as though the ocean were closer than it had seemed from the stargate. Turning, they found that the forest had been hiding a coastline of meandering, rocky cliffs, like the map had been drawn by a child with a bottle of easy cheese. Straight ahead, the path took them off the edge of a narrow channel arrowing deeper into the island. The gap was bridged by a rope and wood slat bridge.

“Well,” Rodney said, peering over John’s shoulder, “I can feel the acrophobia coming on. Which, actually, isn’t a regular for me.”

“You learn new things every day,” John said, feeling a little leery of it himself.

“Perhaps if you closed your eyes as you walked across,” Teyla suggested mildly. Rodney stared at her. John laughed out loud. “I believe it has been used recently,” she added, bending to study the damp earth. John stepped forward, testing the first slat carefully with one foot.

“That’s... odd,” he said. 

“What?” Rodney snapped. “It will give out and plunge us to our deaths? That’s not odd; that’s _entirely expected_.”

“It looks pretty brand new. There are some chips off the wood and it’s stained, but not so much with the weathering.”

“Of course, it’s new. At the height of Ancient Rome, the coloseum had new paint. Also,” he said, recanting, “I will admit that it looks structurally sound. If these bridges are the primary route between islands, they’re probably kept in good repair.”

“Good. Guess we cross it then.”

He waited. McKay stared at him.

“What? I said it looked sound, that doesn’t mean I’m going first. Do you know how valuable I am to--”

John just pressed his lips together into one of those things people called a smile and was surprised to find he meant it. Even the overcast sky couldn’t dim John’s immediate response to smelling the sea. Even after a year on Atlantis--or because of it--it made him feel like there was something good around the corner.

Teyla nodded at him wearily, not anywhere near as tolerant of Rodney as she usually was, and started the uneventful, though noticeably swaying, trek across the bridge. The water beneath them was a dark, rich blue, apparently quite deep.

Soon, they passed another gap in the trees where John could see the--fields? excavations?--before the path met up with a much wider, wetter roadway, and Rodney tripped over a paving stone submerged in the mud. The single stone was flat and smooth and neatly cut, obviously worked by human tools, though the rest of the road was unpaved.

“What,” Rodney said, standing ankle deep in churned mud with the rest of them and hating it, “they unpaved their road?”

“Or maybe they didn’t keep up with road maintenance so much after the last big culling. What do you think, Teyla?”

“Yes,” Teyla said tiredly. “Of course, Colonel,” and looked pretty blatantly under the weather. But when John managed to draw her aside further down the road, she just looked blank and said firmly, “I am fine.” 

“You sure?”

He saw her give in, ducking her head and admitting reluctantly, “I do not sense the Wraith,” which sent alarm bells off all over the place, “but since we stepped through the stargate, I feel as if... I feel some of the same cold in my mind.” She fixed him with a cool glare, clearer than any expression he’d seen on her since stepping through the gate. “I would not hide something that would endanger my team.” 

John skipped over that part. “Not Wraith?” he repeated stubbornly. Up ahead, he could hear Rodney’s monologue falter. When he looked up, Rodney was glancing back at them curiously with a hint of panic.

“No,” Teyla said. “Of that I am sure. I think perhaps it is... a headache, nothing more. I will not stay quiet if that changes.”

“Okay,” John said.

**

At the village, things got a little weirder.

“Oh my god,” Rodney said, shrinking back into John’s shadow and eyeing the forest around them. “You don’t think there are any of them around?”

“Naw,” John said, gazing admiringly at the colossal jaw bones gaping open in a predatory yawn. The path to the village led right through them. “The village wouldn’t be out in the open like this if giant space monsters were an everyday hazard. It looks pretty fossilized. And sort of,” he gestured vaguely, “water-dwelling. _Carcarodon megalodon_ ,” he added with a certain nostalgia. 

“What?” Rodney asked skeptically. Teyla was giving him one of her looks again. 

“You know,” John said, “sharks. Shark. The really big one.” When Rodney’s expression didn’t turn any less horrified, John added, “I was a dinosaur kid. Weren’t you a dinosaur kid? Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Ichthyosaurus.”

“Okay, one, memorization should not be mistaken for intelligence. I had better things to do than learn taxonomy, and two, megalodon was not a dinosaur. Neither was any ichthyosaur or plesiosaur or pterodactyl.”

“Come on, Rodney, you know the kid definition of dinosaur is just ‘cool monster bones!’ so...”

“Ah, ah! Sharks have cartilage!” Rodney stabbed a finger in the air triumphantly.

Teyla snorted and did a weird wise alien thing where she pretended she hadn’t. John shrugged amiably and stepped through the jaws of the village gate.

**

The villagers had a real amish vibe going, which these days made John edgier than automatic rifles. Like the plots they’d seen through the trees, the ground around the village had been ripped up recently, though a heroic effort had been made to conceal it. 

Two teenagers, lithe and lean, met them at the gate, dressed in sturdy pants and simple sleeveless tunics that made John shiver in sympathy. Down at sea level there was less of a bite in the air, but the misty rain was still rolling in over the houses. John’s hair was damp, and there was dew on his P90. 

Painted indigo waves and jaws and tails moved up the kids’ bare arms from the wrist. The girl’s cheeks were marked at the edge of her jaw with dark slashes. John thought, Gills, and didn’t point it out to Rodney because, ok, if sharks were that big a deal, they wouldn’t go swimming, and he didn’t need Rodney to spend twenty minutes persuading him at progressively greater volume. 

The guides led them down towards the waterside into the downtown and a mess of activity and traffic. There were about a hundred villagers gathered in the main square, packing what looked like paving stones and other unidentifiable items into large crates and carting them off to the shore. 

John started getting a little confused when it became clear that boxes full of construction material were being transported from somewhere downhill, unloaded, then loaded again, this time with paving stones and other junk, and finally sent back. Wood, wood, more wood, furniture, thick pillars already carved with horned sharks’ heads. These were apparently being used to construct the simple houses that made up the village. Their guides weren’t much help, being flighty and mostly uncommunicative, the boy finally darting into the crowd while the girl twisted her hair between fingers and stared intently at their weaponry. 

“Well, this is reassuring,” Rodney muttered.

“McKay,” John said. 

Eventually the boy reappeared with a noble looking woman in a billowing robe and a thick-waisted man in work clothes, both dressed in pale sea green, and the teenagers drifted off to rejoin the work. 

“Welcome to our village,” said the woman with graying hair and shoulders broader than John’s. John figured her for the obligatory elder type. “We do not know you,” she added, which, John admitted, didn’t seem so encouraging.

“Pleased to meet you,” John said. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard and this is my team, Teyla Emmagan and Dr. Rodney Mckay.” There was an empty space at the end of his speech for a third name, and John tripped into a bullshit smile, hands clasped over his gun.

“We are the Latere people,” said the old woman, crossing her arms. “I am Senator Panlow and this is Senator Barr.”

“Senator?” Rodney repeated incredulously. “This is a republic?”

“McKay--”

The elder blinked. “You came through the worlds’ gate?”

“If the worlds’ gate is a big round shiny thing that takes you strange places, then yeah. Sure.”

The elder squinted at them. “How did you come? By the cliffs or the valley?”

The team shared a quick discussion by way of looks and eyebrows. “Which one has the bridge?” John asked.

The elder’s eyes widened a tiny fraction, hidden quickly behind a mask of calm. “Ah," she said, "Well. It’s good that you got here then.”

Teyla said carefully, “Should we have taken a different route?”

“On days like today, the water is not so warm. It is good to stay inland,” was all the elder would say. John saw a fishlike body made of blue and green glass dangling from a roof edge, twisting and chiming in the wind. _Definitely no swimming_.

“You’ve come at a bad time, forgetting the weather,” added the man helpfully. He didn’t sound threatening, and in fact, appeared to bat his eyelashes in Teyla’s direction, who thankfully was a little off her game and didn’t notice. Rodney choked. “We’re leaving soon. As we speak, really.” He bobbed his head at the traffic.

“You are... leaving?” Teyla asked frowning at the newly built houses.

“Well, the Wraith--” said the elder.

“--are culling.” The man nodded, satisfied. “We absolutely can’t leave ourselves so open to attack.”

“Steps must be taken,” the woman agreed quickly. John got the feeling she thought her pal was being a little too talkative.

John shared a glance and a raised eyebrow with Teyla. “We know about the Wraith,” he said finally. “Actually, we come from a city that requires a... certain power source to run it, and without it we’re kind of stuck for defending ourselves. So we were wondering if you’d mind us looking around a bit? We got a tip from a nice old woman that this would be a good place to look.” He smiled his best harmless smile.

Behind him, Rodney waved the scanner in a nervous ‘yes, yes, moving on,’ gesture.

The old woman looked unexpectedly interested. “Oh! You don’t say!”

“Don’t get too excited,” Rodney said shortly. “I don’t see anything powerful enough on the scanner--”

“If you’re scavenging,” the elder said, sounding really animated for the first time, making John’s hackles rise, “you must be looking for an artifact of the ancestors.”

“Well--” John said.

“You know where it is?” Rodney asked incredulously. His scanner beeped faintly.

“We wish,” said the man, sighing expansively. He opened his mouth to continue, expression a picture of tragedy--

“Wait!” Rodney said and leaped at a bush. 

The elder stiffened, sliding her hands into the sleeves of her robes. The other guy was in limbo, mouth open on a speech. John looked at McKay, Teyla kept an eye on the natives, and they both pretty much waited for the angry spears to come out. Rodney surfaced with a small, not-amish object in his hand. He flipped something, and one end of it started to vibrate.

“McKay?”

“I--” Rodney looked flummoxed. “I think it’s an electric sander.”

The thick guy said with some annoyance, “Who left that there?” He looked over John’s shoulder and said something colloquial that John thought sounded a lot like cursing a bluestreak.

Which was about the time a young man with a gleaming rifle lined with blinky laser lights stalked up in combat boots, a kevlar-like vest, alien BDUs, a radio, and said, with an eye for the Atlantean’s guns, “Hey, none of that high-tech near the gate!”

“Like you’re one to talk!” said the thick man. “Aren’t you supposed to cover that up with something?” He eyed the elder’s robe significantly.

Rodney goggled at them, Teyla and John swung their guns up to point at the new guy’s chest, and John yelled, “What the Genii is going on here?”

**

“What is this--a movie set?’

John made cutting motions at Rodney but since when had that worked.

They were sitting under the overhang of one of the shiny new huts--though it had been rubbed down with dirt to appear older--set apart from the others on a slight rise. Perhaps it would become a meeting hall when the village was complete. John looked to his right across still water to the blue silhouettes of forested islands.

“The Wraith awakened earlier than expected,” Panlow explained. “Luckily, we are the only inhabited planet in this region of space so the Wraith are slow to appear. It may yet be years before the culling reaches us.”

Senator Barr cut in, worriedly, “Surely you noticed that some of the forests are too slender? Too sparse?”

John glanced at Teyla, who was giving him sort of an expectant look like she wondered why he was having trouble with the easy questions. John said cautiously, “No, the landscape seemed pretty healthy.” Teyla gave him a small, approving smile, and John wondered if he was the only one who’d noticed she was looking a little green.

The Latere smiled instead, obviously pleased. “The ports near the Stargate were built to be integrated with nature,” Panlow admitted, “anticipating their eventual deconstruction.”

“And, of course, they were beautiful!” Barr boomed, throwing up his hands and otherwise beaming like an uncovered light bulb. John figured, ok, he kind of liked this guy.

“Right,” he said. Rodney was--unexpectedly--looking pretty bored. John leaned over. “McKay?” he said quietly. “What? Mystery solved?”

“Oh please, Major,” Rodney said, “They’re hiding from the Wraith. Obviously.”

John felt his shoulders go tense, because, really, not a revelation, but people could be touchy when the secret to their survival was being bandied about with that level of sarcasm.

Senator Panlow only gazed at them serenely, hands hidden in opposing, voluminous sleeves. “Hide what is valued at the end of impossible roads,” she intoned, “and may monsters lurk between what you protect and those that threaten it.”

“Yes, fine,” Rodney said, “but what on earth for? You’ve dismantled your previous settlement, ok. From what you’ve said, you aren’t the low population agrarian society you’re setting up out there, so how are you going to support all the extra people if you punt yourself back to the stone age? Not to mention that you can’t leave people out here after you’ve stripped all their defenses against the Wraith--”

Panlow raised a hand. Her expression had gone a little hard around the eyes.

The young man in the high tech military gear had been hanging around at her back looking somewhat chargrined. The rifle hung from a strap over his shoulder. When Panlow gestured, his back stiffened and his chin lifted in an eerie alien parallel of military attention.

"Yes, Dr. McKay,” said the soldier, who John had started thinking of as ‘Gun’, “that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us will retreat, taking what we’ve learned with us. The bridges are the only way to cross the water, and the Wraith don’t know them. When the bridges are rolled back and our people are in hiding, they won’t look past the farmers on the plain.”

“You really think that will work?” Rodney scoffed. “The Wraith aren’t doing this for fun or because they’re mean. You people are food. We’re _food_. Wherever you go, the Wraith will find you, they have darts that can fly. Trust me--when you’re starving to death, you don’t stop looking just because-- ”

“But it does work,” interrupted Gun, and Panlow was looking smug as all get out. “This will be the third culling we have survived in this manner. How did you think our culture got so advanced?”

**

John called a team huddle on one side of the hut with the Latere at the other, though not far enough away to afford real privacy. He kept his voice low.

“This is insane,” Rodney hissed, trying to shift away from the edge of the overhang and the wet air. 

“McKay, we’re low on allies in this galaxy. What allies we have are low on effective weapons to combat the Wraith--” 

“Is that polite for ‘are low on anything resembling science’?”

“The Latere,” John went on, “have not only _not been culled_ for centuries longer than anyone else, they’re also technologically advanced. We don’t know how much. And if we can convince them to stop hiding and start fighting--”

“So, what? Maybe they have an A-bomb we could borow? Colonel, we are on a world where the entire existence of the military is _highly-trained undercover suicide farmers_.”

“Dr. McKay,” Teyla said patiently, “the men and women in this village did not volunteer solely to die. By fighting for their own lives apart from the advancements their civilization has earned, they insure that the rest of their people will remain hidden.”

“Like I said,” Rodney snapped. “Suicide.”

Teyla’s jaw tightened. “These people survived the culling that destroyed the great cities of my people!” she shot back. John had only been in this galaxy a year, but already the idea of anyone finding a way to escape the effects of the Wraith struck a powerful chord. Even if some of the ways the people here came up with were really creepy.

“Teyla,” John said. She backed off, though her expression stayed steely. On a bad day, Teyla could match Rodney for exasperation with the morons around her. The difference was, it never occurred to Rodney to bother keeping it to himself. 

“Not to be too obvious about this,” Rodney said lightly, sounding not at all casual and a whole lot on the edge of panic, “but we’re supposed to be looking for a ZPM, not discovering underground space bunkers--which is what, a fad in this galaxy? And, oh look, we already have a ZPM. More would be nice, la la, let’s go back to Atlantis before they decide to shoot us and-or expose us to lethal amounts of neutron radiation.”

“I don’t think these people are like the Genii,” John said. “For one, they obviously aren’t trying to keep the secret from other humans. I’ll take that as a good sign.”

“Or maybe they have a really good place to hide the bodies. You did see the excavations on the way in?”

“Teyla,” John said, ignoring him, “I want you to head back to Atlantis. Give Elizabeth a head’s up,” about the negotiations, but also about the possibility of failed negotiations, leading to decisions to shoot them and/or expose them to lethal amounts of neutron radiation. He could count on Teyla pick up on that sort of thing. “Also check up with Beckett for a painkiller before you head back here.”

He got a cool look for that last part, but Teyla wasn’t the type to insist on ignoring a health concern at the expense of the mission. Actually, scratch that, John corrected himself, she was completely the type. She was stronger than anyone he’d ever met. She’d keep going through almost any adversity, missing limbs included. Luckily, she also listened to him. Sort of. 

So Teyla stepped out from the shelter and John started explaining things like opening negotiations and checking back with his boss and they started to walk Teyla back to the Stargate, which was when the Latere went a little batshit. 

“No, no, no,” protested Senator Barr, taking enthusiastic hopping steps towards Teyla that had John putting his hands on his gun and Teyla moving back behind her serene mask and a languid posture that meant she was ready to hug the man or deck him as circumstances required. “You absolutely cannot take the cliff road!”

“Um,” John said, not relaxing his grip. “Why?”

“Usually they prefer to feed in deeper waters, but on cool days, the pistricii swim closer to the surface,” Barr said. “The bridges are high, but not always high enough.”

There was a brief pause.

“Oh,” Rodney said weakly. “Sea monsters. Sea monsters that eat people off of bridges like that _one we walked across_.”

“So you’re saying we can’t go back...?” John asked carefully, stepping between Barr and his team. That put Rodney on the middle, Teyla at the front of any retreat, and John watching their six.

The Senator blinked. “What? Oh no, just take the right fork instead. It will stay in the forest the entire way.”

**

“Of course it appeals to you,” Rodney muttered behind him, when Teyla was walking through the giant jaws--and hey, guess there _were_ some of those still around!--that marked the village entrance. “An army of people specially trained to be human shields--”

John didn’t say: you mean a group of people who fight and die knowing that what they’re doing is protecting their people. Because yeah, ok, it did appeal to him. It struck him as an existence a whole lot more satisfying than fucking up on Atlantis and letting Ford go through that wormhole to who knows where.

Senator Panlow had waited calmly through their little batch of excitement, and a glance from her had kept Gun at his post, causing John to second his earlier suspicion that Panlow was military. When the Latere finished evacuating, he wouldn’t expect to see Senator Barr still here, but he could picture Senator Panlow at the head of a legion of farmers, churning butter with murderous determination.

She appeared now at John’s shoulder and said, “Let me walk with you.”

“Of course, Senator.” John gestured warmly at the path ahead as though he were the host here. Barr had disappeared with a host of fellow--architects? engineers? stage crew?--into the midst of the construction, waving plans and mumbling about weathered thatch. 

When they reached the DHD, Rodney stepped up in an uncoordinated rush, dialing the delta site without even having to be told, or, rather, without John having to make any faces at him. “Right, okay, home sweet home,” Rodney said, and favored their Latere escorts with a ghastly smile of supposed sincerity. 

Teyla disappeared into the wormhole with a nod, and the gate shut down.

“Now,” said Panlow calmly, “would you like a tour of our illusion?”

Rodney sidled up to John’s side, shifting nervously, rubbing a hand on the pants of his BDUs.

“Well,” John drawled, “we were thinking about looking around for that energy source we mentioned, but, hey, a tour--it’ll be like Disney World.”

“Colonel, you remember you’re on an alien planet, don’t you? Fine, fine. As long as we’re moving in--” Rodney pointed slowly, with a cocky jerk at the end. “--that direction.” He had the scanner out. “Something’s showing up that way. From the irregular nature of the data, it’s possible that there's some short of shielding concealing larger readings.”

“Ah,” said the Senator. “You want to see the beach. And the bridges.”

“The beach?” Rodney demanded, “Wait, what about the sea monsters? You said there were sea monsters--”

Then they were part of a caravan towards the shore.

Rodney fell in beside John, fiddling with the scanner and casting nervous glances at the Senator’s back. “Teyla was,” he started awkwardly, “um, quiet?”

John blinked. “She usually is, McKay,” he said automatically.

“No, I know. But I mean, she really--”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He cocked an eyebrow at Rodney. “And if you’re noticing--”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rodney demanded.

“That I... trust your powers of observation." John smiled.

“Oh, ha ha. You think your powers of sarcasm are beyond me.”

“McKay, believe me," John said generously. "I never underestimate you in matters of sarcasm.”

Rodney sniffed. “If you need me, I’ll be over here, doing something useful with my intelligence.” 

He stalked off toward their guides. John followed him, eyes sweeping the villagers passing by with crates and tools. The electric sander had been taken and packed away with the rest of the high-tech tools used to put up the low tech village. These were now being whisked away so as not to disrupt the illusion. Senator Panlow--who wasn’t a village elder type after all, it seemed she'd been elected with ballots and everything--had been watching the scanner thoughtfully ever since.

Rodney wandered back almost immediately. “But--about Teyla.”

“I dunno, Rodney,” John said, and then just for kicks, "Do you want to be the one to ask her if she took her midol this morning?”

“What?” Rodney stared at him. “Oh. Ohhh.”

John figured he might feel bad about that later, but only if Teyla found out.

Senator Panlow drifted back to talk to them. “Other worlds are stunted by the deaths caused by the Wraith,” she said, right out of a tourist pamplet, “or are driven to desperation. But we can build on the intact timeline of our past.” She smiled, a little stilted--her pamphlets must not come with cues for facial expression--and gestured to McKay’s clothing. “We rarely see people so advanced as you. The Wraith prevent it, but we learn better ways to hide with each culling.”

Rodney snorted. “What, with technology? It’s easier to detect technological advancement--you could be giving off EM signals, electricity, radio, light, heat–-”

“Yeah,” John agreed casually, an idea coming to him, “wouldn’t cloaking technology be great?” 

Senator Panlow jerked around the stare at him.

Rodney laughed shortly in the special way that meant he thought John was flattering him. “Even I don’t know how Atlantean cloaks work, Major, I don’t care what Radek says, he’s obviously lying to get back at--”

“I never said you did,” John told him. “But look, Rodney, we’ve got stuff we don’t understand, and they’ve probably got stuff they don’t understand, and wouldn’t a meeting of the minds be cool?”

Rodney looked at John like chocolate, and John forgot to be irritated about the rank mix-up. 

“Actually–-yes.” Rodney turned to Panlow in his 'here, let me explain to you in small words why I'm right and it's great and hurry up I have a deadline' mode, “Look, Senator, whatever your name is–- ”

**

“I’m sorry,” said Senator Barr, shaking his head regretfully. One of the escort had been sent to fetch him almost as soon as Sheppard said the word “cloak”. “You can join us in hiding, but once we roll back the bridges there won’t be any contact through the stargate until the Wraith return to sleep.”

Sheppard’s smile turned brittle. “The Wraith kill us too,” he said with an odd flatness to his voice, which--what? Was supposed to change their minds somehow? With two notable exceptions, the entire structure of the government, as well as any valuable members of the scientific community, had already been evacuated. Any exchange of information would mean bringing non-expendable personnel back to the danger zone--which they weren’t willing to risk--or revealing the location of their secret hidey hole. Friendly though they might seem, the Senators weren’t that stupid. 

Admirable, Rodney thought, and yet less than helpful in this instance.

“Our survival depends on an illusion of simplicity,” said Senator Panlow. “Advanced technology cannot be seen traveling through our gate.”

“We have _cloaked jumpers!_ ”

Rodney’s focus, which had been re-evaluating probable locations of the cloak function in puddlejumper circuit design, flipped back to the present at Sheppard’s tone. Rodney’s pulse kicked up a notch. He thought: maybe Teyla should be here to handle this. Teyla makes the natives like us. Usually. Actually, why keep that to himself.

“Colonel, maybe Teyla--”

“And if you are ever taken by the Wraith,” Senator Panlow continued icily, “you will know exactly where we are.” 

“If you’re worried about us giving you away to the Wraith,” Sheppard drawled, wearing a smile that might have looked lazy on a cougar, “then listen buddy, _it’s already enough that we know you’re hiding at all_.”

Dead silence on the path. People were putting down their burdens, turning to watch them with the beginnings of fear on their faces. Senator Barr paled.

“Oh my god,” Rodney said, “you just convinced the only people in this galaxy possibly more advanced than us to kill us. You moron!”

**

The path narrowed as it descended between dark rock ridges on its way to sea level. Rodney had to press against the rocks so two villagers toting a full crate could get by, casting wary looks at the earthlings as they went. 

The small party had acquired an escort of villagers, carrying tools or construction scraps, all of which were coincidentally hefty and clublike. The senators were striding ahead, Senator Panlow stiff-backed and formal, Senator Barr smiling awkwardly and possibly apologetically. If Senator Panlow weren’t so obvioulsy capable of breaking him in half with her pinky, Rodney might have felt a little more positive about that. 

He’d also feel a lot more positive if Sheppard hadn’t accidentally threatened their entire people with annihilation by Wraith, but there was no use crying over spilt milk. 

Sheppard dropped casually back and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “If we need one, escape plan is me shooting, you running back up the--”

They turned the corner and the whole ocean was spread out before them on the other side of a gray, rocky beach. 

Later, Rodney’s mission report would note the lack of a harbor or any ocean-going vessel, but right now all he could see were the bridges. Sheppard stumbled to a halt.

“Holy shit,” Rodney said, fumbling for his scanner. “I thought they meant more of the--”

“--rope bridges,” Sheppard agreed faintly. “Yeah, me too.” Beside them, the Latere had stopped looking murderous, overcome for the moment by pride. 

The bridges--three of them, huge, flat constructions of metal and polymer, the widest big enough for two tanks to pass each other with room to spare--were obviously Ancient in manufacture. They floated on the surface of the ocean for a hundred yards and then, from what Rodney could see, vanished. 

The bridges themselves were built of detacheable segments about four feet long, marked in the warm red-orange-grey color scheme of parts of Atlantis. The villagers not busy loading or unloading crates onto motorized carts--low tech was apparently restricted to the faux village--were engaged in manually rolling back all but the narrowest bridge. They did so by means of lifting the last slat and twisting it to the side and back, fitting it into a groove that ran along the whole edge of the bridge. The last slat could then be attached to a truck of sorts. When the truck drove back the way it had come, it would pull the entire bridge back in on itself while allowing a small team to supervise the twisting of the slats, to make sure the procedure was running smoothly. On the whole it looked to be a slow and laborious process.

“Whoops, energy spike,” Rodney said, to the sound of snapping cables. 

Lights danced along the edges of the slats as one of the bridges broke away from the truck, unfolding across the water and up the beach with a deafening WHUMP THUMP THUMP, fetching up at Sheppard’s feet like a cat offering its belly to be scratched. Two of their escort threw themselves frantically out of the way. Waves sloshed against the rocks. All along the beach people stopped to stare.

“Hey there,” Sheppard said, inordinately pleased, blinking at the huge mechanical creations arrayed across the beach in front of him. Also: "Sorry about that."

Rodney sniffed. “Stop flirting with the planet's Ancient technology. You’re already married.”

“Aw,” Sheppard said, “Atlantis knows she’ll always be my favorite.”

**

After that, Rodney got to shout at the Latere a lot about ATA and working power sources and the need to examine the Ancient technology. He paused to reflect that he may have unnecessarily confirmed Sheppard’s role in the bridges’ response, then dismissed it. Panlow’s lackey, the kid with the blinky gun, wanted to know why Sheppard had been “chosen by the Ancestors.” Barr had more brain that he’d been showing because he just wanted to know _how_. The whole time, Rodney was more than half-certain that somebody was going to decide enough was enough and just shoot them already. 

Rodney had to bite his tongue on all sorts of useful information like “random genetic characteristic” and “I have the gene too, you know. It could have been responding to _either one of us_.” Better they were a little in awe of Sheppard. A lot better they didn’t know that there were dozens of people on Atlantis equally able to command control of one of the keys to their continued survivial.

(Imagine if they’d been that lucky with the Genii.)

The strategic advantage of the ATA gene in this instance was undeniable. He just wished the Latere hadn’t noticed. Or that Sheppard hadn’t been around to draw their attention to it. He probably thought he was _helping_.

Then Panlow gave them the obvious out, with a question, “Can you roll them _back_?” that didn’t sound much like a question at all. 

Armed with farming equipment, the Latere huddled around Rodney while he kneeled on the rocky beach, prodding at the end of the smallest bridge in hopes of finding a control panel. He thought about panic and also about wet while mist fell against his eyelashes and onto the back of his neck.

Sheppard crouched next to him, keeping a watchful eye on the Latere. “We need to get back to Atlantis, bring back a jumper.”

Rodney stared at him. “Oh, yes, that will be handy when Atlantis comes to retrieve our _corpses_.”

“Puddlejumpers have cloaks, and they’re a lot more portable than the control room. Just--maybe if they see it, they’ll realize what we’ve got to offer.”

“And what do they have to offer us? They’re hermits!” 

“McKay, there are thousands, maybe millions of people here, safe from the Wraith. If we can help with that... that’s worth a lot.”

“Until they decide to shoot us and steal the puddlejumper because you can’t reverse engineer the secrets of the Ancients from a quick peek.”

“They’d need the gene to fly it,” Sheppard pointed out.

“Fine,” Rodney snapped. “Until they decide to shoot you and Teyla, kidnap me, and steal the puddlejumper because you can’t reverse engineer the secrets of the Ancients from a quick peek.”

“How come you get to be the kidnapped one?” Sheppard’s lips were twitching. Rodney thought he’d be happier about his singular ability to cheer up the Colonel if the Colonel’s sense of humor were less annoying and, oh yes, if they weren’t _about to die_. Sheppard ran a hand across his forehead, pushing back the hair sticking to his damp skin.

“Please," Rodney huffed. "You can fly it; I can fly it and explain how it works.” 

Sheppard arched an eyebrow at him, and could the man at least pretend to know he’d given the natives reason to murder them? Twice? “I dunno if I’d call what you do flying...”

“Colonel Sheppard? Dr. McKay?” asked Senator Barr, standing anxiously behind them, wringing his hands. Because, of course, he was probably here to announce the death sentence. 

Sheppard straightened. 

“Do you know yet if you can roll the bridges back?”

Sheppard shrugged. “I could give it a shot.”

Rodney groaned. “No, no, you can’t. As much as I dislike dying on an alien world beaten to death by primitve farming equipment because of your trademark tourettes negotiating style, you have no idea what else these are designed to do. Tossing off poorly-planned mental commands at this point would be bad.”

For the first time, Sheppard’s forehead showed a wrinkle of worry. Rodney hmphed at him in satisfaction before turning back to the bridge. Then he heard Senator Panlow say flatly, “Watch the gate,” and suddenly Rambo was tapping a radio on his outfit and telling teams 1 and 2 to intercept Teyla Emmagen. He only half heard the instructions to do so “nonlethally” because the world had whited out a little. 

He came back to himself with his hands braced on the gray, beaded tread of the bridge, staring up at Panlow and Sheppard. Sheppard, who was speaking softly and reasonably, who only remembered how to sound like a professional when he was furious. Sheppard, who thought negotiations shouldn’t be more complicated than a group of friendly people being neighbourly, who thought everybody knew that “I can tell the Wraith where you are” meant “We’re all in this together.”

The villagers closed in a ring around them. The guy in the high tech gear pulled his rifle and the rest lifted their scythes and pitchforks competently, reminding Rodney that these people were the planet’s special ops. Rodney’s radio crackled. Sheppard didn’t bat an eye to betray that he'd heard anything.

Teyla said, “I have spoken with Doctor Weir. She is excited about the prospects of the Latere as allies.” A pause. “Colonel--there are some Latere in the woods. I believe they are looking for me. Are things well with you? The Latere seem... tense.”

Rodney scratched his ear, stealthily tapping the radio. “You won’t catch her,” he said lifting his chin. “She’ll go through the gate, report, and come back with reinforcements.”

“McKay,” Sheppard said patiently, also scratching his ear because he wasn’t stupid, “No need to worry just because I activated some Ancient tech. You’re working on a fix, we’re uninjured--“

“SO FAR,” Rodney squeaked while an alien method actor threatened him with a rake.

“--and Senator Panlow is a very reasonable military leader.”

Apparently the Latere weren’t stupid either because after that they took the radios.

“ANCIENT SUBMERSIBLE BRIDGES BEACH DEATH FARMERS,” Rodney finished in a rush.

“Well,” Sheppard said, “at least they know we wouldn’t give up their secret.”

**

“No,” Rodney said, “I refuse to be calm in the event of my death.” 

“No! If Pistricii fall from the sky, no!” Senator Barr’s exclamations had grown progressively more colloquial in time with his agitation. “We wouldn’t kill you, but--” Rodney almost called ‘Foul!’ because pauses like that were completely unfair, “you’ll have to come back to the city--”

“Okay,” Sheppard said reasonably, nodding. He looked oddly light without his tac vest and P90. His hands were perched awkwardly on his hips like he didn’t quite know where to put them. Panlow had stalked up the gray beach with two Latere soldiers, leaving Barr with three as backup while he tried to explain the new situation to their guests. 

“What? So we can be tried by a jury of our peers? Because you have to admit, ninjas with hoes don’t really qualify. Although, honestly--”

“Honestly, Rodney is without peer,” Sheppard said, grinning.

Rodney sniffed. “I wasn’t going to say that.” 

“Of course you weren’t,” Sheppard agreed warmly. Dampness from the ocean and the mist had colored all the rock of the narrow beach dark like wet shale.

Panlow finished discussing with her lieutenants below the tall evergreens jutting up from the sides of the path, jerking a hand up in a clear signal. Rodney glared at Barr again, who looked miserable but also determined. Panlow turned and started walking towards the biggest bridge and the truck/cart thing parked on it with its motor running. The Latere around Rodney and Sheppard, which included the one with the rifle, moved forward as one, clearly intent on herding the Atlanteans with them.

Sheppard said, “Once we speak to your council, we’ll be able to leave?”

Barr didn’t answer immediately, rubbing his hands together anxiously. “I’m not--I’m not a regular member of the council. I’m an architect. Working here requires a certain status and so I was--”

“I’m sorry, did we care?” Rodney snapped, stumbling over a wobbling rock, glaring the tiny oysters peeking out from the underside of the stone. 

“You’re welcome to join us in hiding,” Barr said finally, helplessly, sounding a little like one of Panlow’s tourist pamphlets.

“Okay,” Sheppard said sweetly. Rodney glanced up, knowing he was making a horrible face, but what was with the smiles? He opened his mouth to ask because, really, was he missing something here? He was about to be locked up in a hidden city forever and deprive the world of his--

Sheppard stumbled to the side. The Latere with the gun reached for Sheppard’s elbow, letting go of the gun--the Latere had begun favoring Sheppard’s grins almost as soon as Rodney opened his mouth because playing favorites was apparently universal--and Sheppard’s arm connected with the Latere’s windpipe just as his other hand found the rifle barrel. 

“Duck,” Sheppard said, so Rodney hit the ground throwing his hands over his head. He heard two shots and, “Okay, time to run,” so he came up, throwing a fist sized rock at the Latere who wasn’t on the ground. The Latere in kevlar was lying in a crumpled heap behind him, and Sheppard had the rifle off the strap, backing as quickly as possible towards the tree line.

The scrambled up the slope, incline and mud making progress slow and desperate. Rodney grabbed at tree trunks, hauling himself up by the strength of his arms and reached the top, gasping, cradling scraped palms and panic when he realized Sheppard wasn’t there with him. 

“It’s okay, coming,” Sheppard said, sounding distracted. Rodney heard two more rifle shots and then scrambling behind him. “Ok,” Sheppard said, eyeing the sky through the tree branches. “Gate’s...this way,” and took off before Rodney could protest resting their survival on Sheppard’s directional sense. At least it was drier under the trees.

**

They hit the roadblock about a mile from the shore. Turned out, yes, of course, Sheppard knew which direction the Stargate was in because he’d been relying on following the road. Peering over the ridge, Rodney stared at the scattered Latere huddled behind trees and brush, ambushing anyone moronic enough to come strolling down the path. Three scouts faced outward, scanning the forest. Rodney ducked back down next to Sheppard against the wet mix of leaves and dirt. 

“They have scythes,” Rodney insisted, gesturing at the rifle, “couldn’t you--?”

Sheppard looked up his inspection of the Latere weapon, staring at Rodney for a long second. “Yes,” he said evenly, “I could take them out.”

Rodney swallowed coldly, because the Colonel was looking at him like Rodney had just asked him to kill twelve people because it would be easy. “No, no, of course not,” Rodney said quickly. He wanted his life signs detector. 

"Okay,” Sheppard was saying, pointing somewhere off to the left and away from the Latere, “you make for the gate, follow that ridge over there. I'll circle round and meet you. Hopefully, you’ll meet up with Teyla. She’ll be heading for the beach--towards us." And nodded at him like that settled that.

Except Rodney heard, So long, Rodney, and--there was just no fucking way. Shivering, he reached under his expedition jacket, pulling out a square of matte black plastic. When Sheppard turned away in a crouch, Rodney placed the folded database square lightly on the back of Sheppard’s neck. It worked like a charm, Sheppard sighing softly and collapsing forward into the loam, the rifle pinned beneath him.

Rodney stared at him, cupping the square against Sheppard’s skin, and thought, Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, and also, I can’t kill twelve people either.

**

John heard roaring silence where he expected voices and a slow wind through the trees. Where he expected to feel the uneven relief of a forest floor against his knees, only a bright circle of heat at the back of his neck let him know he had a body at all. Without arms, he couldn’t reach up to push it off.

**

“He’s sick!” Rodney barked. “It’s congenital! Don’t move him, you horrible--okay, yes, fine, you can have the gun--Hey, hey!”

Barr stood on the small rise, shadowed by the forest and the mist, staring at the two Atlanteans sitting on the forest floor. In Rodney’s defense, there really wasn’t any other way to hold the square against Sheppard’s skin without being really obvious about it. For their part, the Latere soldiers seemed to have lost any inclination to be gentle with Sheppard. Rodney wondered how many Latere Sheppard had killed during the escape.

He heard the rumble of an engine from the road, and soon two Latere appeared over the ridge, passing out handguns and rifles to the farmer-soldiers, who were quickly slinging their pitchforks and shovels back over their shoulders, and seriously, who had shoulder straps for shovels? 

Barr said, sounding as nauseous as Rodney felt, “We’ll return to the city, where you can seek medical treatment for Colonel Sheppard.” He said the name stiffly, like he was forcing himself to remember that Sheppard was an individual and not a random, extremely skilled perpetrator of lethal violence. “Please do not resist, there is no need to cause more loss of life, you have not been sentenced to anything--”

Rodney remembered not to shout, “Yet!” indignantly, but only because Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard was passed out in his lap and his hair was tickling Rodney’s palm.

Then the Latere were lifting Sheppard (“Gently, you miserable, slimy oafs!”) while Rodney rushed to keep a hand against the square he’d tucked into the back of Sheppard’s t-shirt while a pitchfork ninja pressed the alien equivalent of a 9mm against his back. They ended up in the back of the truck he’d seen on the beach, Latere perched on the back of the open cab and more Latere walking round the truck in guard. Rodney saw their tac vests piled in the opposite corner of the truck, but there was also a Latere sitting on top of that, and she noticed Rodney looking, narrowing her eyes and tightening her grip on her handgun.

Rodney tried to look harmless while also looking like he wasn’t weird about keeping a hand underneath Sheppard’s neck--

Oh god, he’d made Sheppard pass out, he was keeping Sheppard out, definitely against his will and against his orders, he’d accidentally on purpose gotten them captured, what if there were health risks involved: brain damage, cardiac arrest, low blood sugar--

This was so stupid, he should have ideas better than this, ideas that deserved to have their own bestselling memoirs written about them. It was such a phenomenally bad idea--but no matter how bad it had been, letting John go off by himself had been fucking impossible.

So Rodney sat on an alien truck, surrounded by alien guards and his unconscious team leader, and thought about PTSD as they drove out onto the bridges that became complicated, multi-chambered tunnels a hundred yards from shore, descending into dimness beneath the surface of the ocean.

They drove by tall windows that cast shifting shadows across the floor. Red light couldn’t penetrate very far underwater, and everything took on a blue-tinge, brown hair going gray and skin looking sickly and washed out. All around plastic gleamed like steel, marked with odd protuberances and angles; machinery essential to the maintenance of the tunnels become something like public art in the hands of Ancient architects. 

The passage was lit dimly by a trail of electric lights along the high ceiling, obviously installed by the Latere. Occasionally, dark recesses hinted at hidden doorways. Geometric patterns of orange and red lit up bright within the wall panels as they passed, stunning against the blue, tumbling after them in a flickering dance. Some of the Latere seemed unnerved, some of them admiring, but there was no other response to the ATA. Trapped under many feet of ocean water in an enclosed space, Rodney wasn’t about to start experimenting.

His panic hadn’t receded with time, but sooner or later he’d have to try _something_ , or resign himself to being tried for some mysterious crime by whatever dubious judicial system Barr kept hinting at.

After about ten minutes of slow travel, they hit a fork in the tunnel system where two tunnels from the mainland joined into one. A group of Latere waited there with another truck, Panlow as their vanguard. Rodney didn’t recognize her at first because she’d stripped off her voluminous robe, revealing a high-tech military outfit to match the Latere whose gun Sheppard had stolen on the beach.

Her face was murderous, and it wasn’t until they got closer and Rodney saw the three body shapes and the red on white sheets that he guessed why. 

When she spoke it was an emotionless, “He’s shot?” meaning Sheppard.

One of the Latere stepped forward to report. Rodney tried to communicate through a series of tragic expressions that he was worried about Sheppard’s serious chronic condition. Barr hopped out of the cab, but Panlow had already heard all she needed to hear because she pointed at Sheppard draped across Rodney’s lap and said, “Bring him.”

“Excuse me,” Rodney snapped, pulling the square away from Sheppard’s skin. “Did you miss that he is seriously ill? I don’t know what kind of abyss of human rights protection you people are suffering from, but you can yell at him after he gets medical attention! Look, he can’t even walk.” This last was hissed for the express benefit of Sheppard’s fluttering eyelids and sleepy glare. 

“Rodney?” Sheppard rasped, frowning with sleepy perplexity. His recovery obviously wasn’t as immediate as it had been on Atlantis, but there didn’t seem to be any lingering brain damage--

“Hypoglycaemia is a very serious condition!” Rodney finished. He felt Sheppard’s back tense against legs, and halfway through freaking out all over again, thought, is he laughing?

But Sheppard must have caught some of what Rodney was saying because when the Latere pulled him away, he sagged in their hands and forced them to all but drag him to the second truck. Rodney would have worried that maybe there were side effects after all, except he was pretty sure he knew the meaning of Sheppard’s clear-eyed stare as they pulled him off the truck. Then the wounded soldiers--thank god, only one of them was legitimately a corpse--were being transferred from Panlow’s truck to Barr’s and Panlow’s truck was executing a stupid looking three point turn inside the tunnel, which was just absurdly mundane, and heading back the way it’d come--

“Wait, wait,” Rodney protested, “where are they going? Aren’t we going to the city? We have an appointment with your incompetent judicial system--”

Barr’s eyes as he got back into the cab were huge in his pale face, and Rodney felt his voice desert him, replaced by something icy and suffocating.

**  
Disoriented didn’t begin to cover how John felt, waking up in Rodney’s lap to coded babbling and enemy hands closing on his arms and legs, but after that, things started moving right along with no time to spare for confusion. 

He ended up sprawled on his stomach on the truck bed, hands braced on the blood-slick metal with Latere standing over him, weapons drawn. There were maybe seven guys in the truck, not counting Panlow perched on the back of the cab, lights flashing past over her head. Every so often, they passed through a ridge in the ceiling and walls, as though the tunnel was less a long hall than a series of connected rooms. Panels were lighting randomly as they went by, brushing against his awareness in little tingles of ATA. 

John thought, _can I use that?_ for all of two seconds before they passed a window and he saw nothing but deep, deep blue. _Can I use that_ turned into _holy crap_. The tunnel segments suddenly made a lot more sense as points at which flooded sections of the tunnel could be isolated from the rest. The ridges probably hid some kind of retracted doors.

He smelled salt and felt sun against his skin, and then they were blasting out of a tall archway into full view of the sky, swaying with the waves. Somebody got their hands under his arms, hauling him up. He remembered to stay limp, but since a minute ago he’d apparently been out cold in Rodney’s lap, playing sick seemed redundant.

Panlow said mildly, “If you would be so kind, Colonel?” 

They were on the open bridges John had seen from shore, wind in his face, with a group of Latere clustered together maybe two hundred yards ahead, working with another truck to fold up the bridge John and his ATA had rolled out. Somebody next to him barked into the radio, and the workers scattered to the right. John thought about telling Panlow to fuck off, but they could probably roll out the bridge without his help.

So--what the hell. John gave the bridge a nudge: hey, sweetheart.

He figured they’d ditch the truck once they hit the beach; he hadn’t seen any inland, and he couldn’t remember if the roads were any good for them. Instead, Panlow leaned over the driver and pointed in some mysterious direction--John just saw trees and rock--and the driver nodded, bumping along the beach and up a wide dirt road, not the one John and Rodney had walked down.

When the soldier let go of his shoulder, he made sure to slump down into the truck bed at the next bump. He regretted that instantly; he couldn’t see crap from down here, only feel the rise in altitude. That was probably why, when they finally dragged him off the truck, he took half a step and almost fell off a cliff.

“Careful,” said the guy holding him insincerely. Somebody laughed. The wind was strong up here and cold. John leaned into his support dutifully, staring at the surf foaming around the rocks below. Nobody lowered their guns. They remembered the last time John had supposedly been harmless, which, god damnit, wasn’t going to make this any easier.

Panlow got off the truck, heading for a wood and rope bridge John hadn’t seen before, connecting this island and the next where two peninsulas reached towards each other like Michelangelo’s Creation of Man. 

“Should you be bringing that truck up here?” John called, as he was shoved and jostled along after her. “The Wraith might come through and spot it and then all that holding us prisoner you’ve got going for you would be kind of a waste.”

Panlow smiled at him. She looked sort of like John’s grandmother. “They find the water on this planet unpleasant.”

“You’re not afraid of the Wraith,” John said suddenly.

“The Wraith are terrifying, Colonel, but we have hope.” She waved at the guards to bring him to her where she stood at the center of the bridge underneath a sturdy wooden construction that compared to some of the things he’d seen in the pegasus galaxy, didn’t look alien at all. Actually, John thought it was pretty obviously a gallows, and well, fuck.

Teyla could really show up anytime now. That would be great.

“You find that surprising,” Panlow observed.

“It’s not an outlook we see much--in this galaxy,” John replied mechanically, staring at the well-used rope hanging off the arm of the scaffolding and wrapped around its base.

Panlow stepped forward, suddenly all menace. “You brought that fear back to us, Colonel,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” John said roughly. “Sorry about that.”

**

Wedged uncomfortably between the cab and the body of a Latere with a hole through his shoulder, Rodney announced, “I assume I’ll be asked to demonstrate the merits of intellectual exchange to your council members. Considering that the life of my--friend will probably depend on it, I think some time to prepare--” 

His fingers had closed around the edges of the database square through his jacket. He just had to convince them to let him take it out and he’d search through it, find something that would show them what Atlantis had to offer. They could go after Panlow and convince her that trials before executions were all the rage.

The guy with his ribs on the business end of Rodney’s knee gave a disbelieving laugh. He looked bled out, pale skin and bandages and blood in his curly hair. Rodney ignored him. He was going somewhere with this. He opened his mouth.

“There will be an investigation into the casualties suffered,” Barr said.

“Would that investigation include the premeditated murder of someone in your custody?”

“Usually,” Barr admitted awkwardly.

Rodney stared. “Usually?”

“Panlow is a war hero,” Barr said vaguely, and also, “There probably won’t be a body.” His tone suggested that the latter was at once unrelated to the former and immensely obvious for some particular Laterian reason with which Rodney was unfamilar.

“What?” Rodney’s throat tried to close off. “You--oh god, you mean I’m right. They’re really going to--”

As one motion, he took out the database square and flipped it open. The soldiers reacted predictably; Barr got shoved down into the cab, a Latere imposing herself between them while about dozen other soldiers leveled their weapons. The truck, already moving lethargically because half the Latere were walking behind it, creaked to a halt.

“Dr. McKay,” said the guy who was probably a Lieutenant of some kind, “please put down--”

“It’s not a weapon,” Rodney said coldly. He held the square out, not making any sudden movements except that he was shaking. “It is a scientific encyclopedia, and if you are going to insist that Senator But the People Love Her Caesar is above the law, then please let me find you a better reason--like ancient cloaking technology--for her to keep her lethal impulses in check. Okay?”

Which had actually made the Latere twice as interested in taking it away, but Rodney yelled and curled around it like a child, glaring at Barr the whole time, who said finally, moronically, “He’s not a prisoner.” The soldiers didn’t like it, but Barr’s rank–for all he said it had been a bureaucratic necessity—appeared to be real. Rodney got to keep the square and also two Latere with weapons raised, whose apparent job was to make sure the part about the secret bomb hadn’t been a lie. 

Rodney didn’t look at them, staring at the database square unfolded in his lap in numb panic. The glow of the gold on black script had an almost, well, no, not really at all, calming effect. The Latere lying next to him glared at him balefully.

He could probably crash the truck. Unfortunately, Radek was right; the square was likely useless without a central database to connect to, and without that inside information, there was no way to know where any given door would lead: escape, ocean, broom closet.

Lying was a possibility. He could backtrack and confess that the square actually was a secret bomb, but a person couldn’t shout, “No, wait! I meant Aces!” in the middle of a game of Bullshit and not expect someone to call his bluff.

He tapped the bubble on the menu screen that had led to the control room schematics on Atlantis. 

The screen went blank. Rodney’s heart sank.

Eventually, a bubble diagram opened across the black, cycling him back to the opening screen. This time, he noticed that the title category he’d chosen had a new suffix: an ancient letter which even Ancient-as-a-Second-Language scientists like Rodney recognized as Ancient shorthand for “empty set.”

There were only two category titles without the symbol. The first led very obviously to a single blueprint of a dozen interconnecting rooms. The second led to a huge directory of--yes, yes, thank god, a tunnel system. There were maps with internal indices such that Rodney could select any interesting bit and zoom in or tap a finger against a particular area until he brought up a detailed schematic with footnotes. Thirty seconds in, the screen flashed something in Ancient at him and upsized a section of the tunnel system some distance away from the one he’d been looking at.

It was an animation of the open walkways that were beginnings of the tunnel system. One of the bridges was busily unfolding with much fanfare of scrolling text and helpfully highlighted mechanics. In short, the bridge was responding to the presence of an ATA gene, meaning that Panlow had taken John back to the beach and that her truck was moving a hell of a lot faster than Rodney’s.

He hoped Panlow was very particular about the location of her vigilante murders and that she wouldn’t hurt Sheppard until she got there. And when she did, maybe she’d spend the next five hours arranging the furniture to her satisfaction.

Quickly, he dragged the picture to the right, tracing the tunnel back until he found a set of a dozen or so life signs: the Latere around Barr’s truck. Perfect, perfect, perfect. A few determined taps brought up what looked like a control schematic. He touched a few different spots randomly, hoping for an ancient readme file.

Instead he was momentarily blinded by the intensity of all the lights in the tunnel coming on simultaneously. The Latere of their escort let out startled shouts, heads turning warily, weapons raised in anticpation of attack. The truck came to an abrupt halt, but discipline seemed tight, everyone waiting for the officer and Barr to exchange a few sentences.

An airlock door slammed shut in front of them with a thundering boom, blocking the tunnel. Echoes bounced away down the hall.

“He did it!” accused the wounded Latere next to Rodney, which was just unnecessarily vindictive. “With the black thing!”

“What—no, I didn’t!”

“I need to take that, Dr. McKay,” said one of the able-bodied.

“I told you--it’s an encyclopedia. Touch it all you want—it can’t do anything!” He flapped the unfolded square at the Latere lieutenant, who was starting to look embarrassed to be in the same truck as Rodney. 

But the lieutenant nodded at a soldier, who shouldered his rifle and took the square, poked suspicious fingers at the Ancient writing, eyes darting over the text with greater fluency than Rodney had yet achieved. Oh damn it, he hoped there wasn’t anything—like, oh, a big blinking box that said _PUSH FOR LIGHTS_. Thank god, thank god, the square wasn’t as read-only as it had seemed on Atlantis.

Desperately, Rodney said, “Of course, Colonel Sheppard has affected the bridges before, but Senator Panlow, I’m sure, wouldn’t allow this sort of funny business.” He added another choked, “Of course,” when the Lieutenant looked him over. 

The Lieutant leaned over to discuss with Barr. The conversation was tense; Barr’s face changing slowly from unhappy to stubborn. Unbelievably, they returned the square. Barr wasn’t a soldier; he was a highly educated civilian, someone Rodney understood, and Panlow’s casual life-or-death decisions upset him. Somehow it had become important to Barr that Rodney not appear to be a prisoner. 

The soldiers attempted to raise Panlow’s party on their radios in case Sheppard was somehow affecting the lights and doors.

It didn’t work. Panlow was out of radio range or didn’t want to be interrupted in the middle of her alien revenge ritual of mysterious disappearing bodies. Barr sent half a dozen of their escort to check up in person, jogging back down the tunnel, while the rest moved on with the wounded. The city couldn’t be far if they were willing to move their casualties forward on foot. 

A petite woman in a farmer’s smock padded quietly over from the airlock door. She reported success, and Rodney was escorted off the truck and towards the huge door blocking the tunnel. There were two small, human sized doors in the wall before the big airlock doors, one on each side of the tunnel. They went single-file through the left-side door, which opened into a bubble-walled gallery that bypassed the shut airlock door. The ocean floor was a distant shadow below them.

Barr was in the middle of the group with the wounded, while the Lieutenant kept Rodney up front in a blatant attempt to force him to walk into whatever traps he might be setting.

Up front was better for Rodney, actually, because the side passage was segmented too. As stepped into the next segment, Rodney just ran a thumb along the edge of the database square, and a door shut between him and the Latere behind him. 

The single Latere left in front turned around narrow-eyed. 

Rodney lifted the square. He said flatly, “Drop your weapons or I’ll flood the hallway behind me.”

There was a wavery, light-headed moment where he thought he might faint at his hostage’s feet. But something about the speed with which the soldier raised his gun brought Rodney’s focus right back to the here and now. So did the text window that popped up on the data screen as he spoke.

It said, in Ancient, “Initiate intruder protocol? Y/N. Lethal force? Y/N.”

**

Three of Panlow’s soldiers had to hold him down to get the rope around his wrist. After that, John didn’t think the Latere were buying the “sick” act anymore. 

At first, when the skinny one yanked John’s arm away from his side, John had been relieved. Ropes for hanging people didn’t go around your wrist. Then a red-headed soldier stepped reverently up to the rope railing, speaking slow practiced phrases to the sea, and John saw the blue glass fish charms hanging from the scaffolding. He looked away with a jerk, but then he was staring at the wooden slats of the bridge – at the graceful bodies with their long jaws carved into the wood. The bridge must be as new and as false as the village, but they’d still taken the time to decorate it with their love--or fear--of the sea.

Though the bridge moved in the wind and the slats were slippery with mist, Panlow stood away from the rope railings' support, holding the coarse rope that connected the scaffolding to John’s wrist. Slowly, she wrapped it around one palm, pulling against John’s wrist until his arm was outstretched between her and the two Latere pinning him against the ropes with their weight and a gun against his temple.

“The Wraith are the only enemy worth having,” she said with a voice dense like lead.

“Sometimes I think we’re the only ones that get that,” John said honestly, feeling the cold point of the gun against his skin. “Look--let us go. We can still help you. What we said about cloaks--”

“Did we harm you?” Panlow asked, lips twisting with regret and self-directed mockery.

“I’ve been in this galaxy long enough not to trust people’s good intentions,” John said.

“One of my soldiers died protecting his people today, Colonel, and he didn’t die by the Wraith.”

“And one of my _scientists_ is your captive, taken away from the city that _he keeps safe_ ,” John shouted back without really meaning to and considered throwing up as a diversionary tactic.

Her chin lifted, a picture of regal, infuriating pride. She dropped the rope from her hands. It must have been the signal for something because the gun left John’s temple, and his two guys started to shift their grip from pinning him to gripping his arms above the bicep. Intellectually, John had known he’d fight it, but knowing and feeling had always been like estranged siblings to him, so when he felt the railing begin to shift as they lifted him up, he kicked out almost before he realized they’d gotten to this point. 

He got a weak punch against a brunette’s cheekbone and doubled over as somebody slammed a rifle butt into his ribs. By luck and some sequence of motion he couldn’t remember, one of the Latere slipped on the slick wood and John lunged, feeling his hand close on one of the Latere pistols. His thoughts skittered erratically, and John realized he hadn’t been expecting success.

Pain ripped through his calf, and he yelled. Somebody yanked at the rope around his right wrist, pulling him off balance, and the red-head who’d chanted the sea monster prayers hit him full in the chest. He felt the railing at his back, then it was slippling against his spine, then gone entirely. He was suddenly, disorientingly weightless, wind in his ears.

He dimly heard Panlow’s voice as he fell, sounding a hundred years tired and not at all like herself: “Oh, damn it.”

**

Apparently they taught Ancient in Laterian elementary because when the text window popped up, the soldier went white and dropped the gun to the floor.

Rodney said, "Oh. Yes, okay, good. Um. Back up. A little? No, I mean, that's an order." A strange shuffle followed, involving a nerve-wrecking crouch to retrieve the surrendered weapon and the awkward maneuver of edging past each other in the narrow passage, a thumb over the malevolent “yes” box and his other hand on the gun. 

With the latter accomplished and no Latere between him and the hallway’s exit, Rodney breathed a sigh of relief, pressing down with his thumb. The soldier’s face tightened in fury and betrayal. Maybe he shouted, but the door between his segment and Rodney’s snapped shut before a sound came out. “Oh, pay attention!” Rodney groused. “I pushed something else entirely!”

He walked out of the passage and into the main tunnel. He was now on the opposite side of the large airlock door. Not where he wanted to be. He crossed the hall to the second side passage on the other wall. He stopped for a moment, staring out at a school of tiny fish swimming just past the glass. Sheppard would love this, and nothing on this planet cared except for Rodney. And Teyla if she was okay, and on her way to rescue them.

Fifty feet later, he popped out beside the abandoned truck.

The Latere sitting on the cab said, “What?” in a horrified voice. Rodney shrieked bloody murder, scrambling at the square to type “Yes, yes, YES,” until some power in the walls thrummed to life. 

A sound on the edge of hearing hit him in the chest to the side of his heart with physical force. For an instant, vertigo and the jarring vibrations beneath his feet convinced him he would shake apart, but warmth and stillness spread out from the thin square of plastic in his hands, and that was when he heard the Latere screaming. 

Rodney thought of blood on bandages and the obnoxious tattletale moron bumping against his knees and that he’d never had the stomach for any kind of violence, ever--he’d passed out once from a museum tour’s explanation of chinese foot binding--and that Sheppard was probably already dead. 

He found the off command, but it didn’t feel like soon enough, staring at the Latere guard curled on the floor of the tunnel by the truck, one hand wrapped loosely around her weapon. Strange, dark bruising streaked from her neck to the collar of her peasant costume, creeping up her wrists from the edges of her sleeves. He put a shaky hand against her throat, and oh god, she wasn't dead.

“Sorry,” he said uselessly, and then because he was, as usual, the only one who could save the day and also possibly Sheppard, he dragged her as gently as possible out of the way and hopped in the cab, a tunnel map cued on the database square beside him on the passenger seat.

He found their tac vests and radios in the back, and but not their weapons. The truck’s controls were not difficult to figure out. Halfway to the tunnel entrance, Teyla’s strained voice said, “It is good to hear your voice, Dr. Mckay. Are you well? Where is the Colonel?”

“Panlow’s spirited him off to have her angry way with him, and by way I mean painful death. Where are you? Panlow’s escort hit the beach a few minutes ago.” The trucks of the Laterian military were steered with levers, not wheels, and maybe they weren’t as advanced at Rodney had first thought because apparently they’d never heard of power steering.

“I am in the woods above the beach. I believe I see the bridges you described, but only one reaches the shore. As you say, a vehicle with several soldiers left it a short time ago. I did not see the Colonel--” she broke off. “We will not let her take him,” she added, a quiet statement of fact. 

“Well, he was there,” Rodney said flatly, choosing to ignore misplaced and ridiculous assurances. “Did you see where it went? Our P90s are gone, so are the 9mms, and the Colonel doesn’t have his radio. On the plus side, I have a Latere rifle and pistol, and I’m pretty sure in this case that ‘trigger’ as an archetype spans galaxies.”

He could hear her staring at him. “I believe so. Wait a moment, please, Dr. McKay.” And then silence. Rodney glanced at the datasquare next to him, seeing lifesigns blinking at the end of the map’s visible window: the Latere Barr sent to check up on Panlow.

“Oh, crap,” Rodney muttered, jerking a lever until the truck came to a shuddering stop. There was a familiar text box on the screen. “No!” Rodney told it. “Stop asking me.” Out of spite, he exited the text box of death and scrolled back to the trapped Latere, bringing up the door commands after a short search. Shutting and locking the airlock door and both side passages between him and them, he opened the side door in the direction of their city. 

“I am following the vehicle’s tracks,” Teyla said quietly in his ear. “They took a wide road that seems to follow the cliffs past the village, away from the stargate.”

Rodney was studying the tunnel map. “Okay, got it. You know what, I’m going to take a different bridge. It’s been rolled up completely, it won’t be guarded, and as a plus, I won’t have to drive thru six paranoid soldiers to get there. It should intersect with your road. I think.”

“I will continue following the tracks,” Teyla agreed.

“Righto,” Rodney said, with an odd feeling of déjà vu.

There wasn’t anybody in the tunnel that Rodney chose, so he learned a lot about the top speeds of Latere transports on straightaways. Also, the unrolling of a fully folded and submerged Ancient bridge was an impressive thing from the inside. Pockets of air ran like backwards tears up the arched windows, silent against the smooth hum of brilliant machinery, mechanical processes sliding into each other seamlessly even after tens of thousands of years. The tunnel crested with the muted thunder of waves and white foam, inertia tugging at Rodney’s unhappy stomach.

This bridge was narrower than the others, ending at an even narrower beach. Rodney managed to get the truck to the end of a steep, zigzagging path by driving one side of the truck through the shallows. The path itself however was hopelessly steep and uneven, and so Rodney buckled himself into one of the tac vests and his backpack, Sheppard’s radio in the pocket and lifted both Latere weapons. He also transferred Sheppard’s stash of power bars to his own vest. The waves caused by the bridge’s rising were still lapping against the shore and the truck’s tires. 

He was just turning the corner on the first switch back when three Latere dressed in rough homespun and carrying sidearms burst around the turn, gaping openly at the bridge bobbing softly by the shore. They must have heard the fanfare. Rodney had the database square in one pocket and a gun in either hand and absolutely no tactical advantage.

Crack, crack, crack, and three bodies hit the ground. Softly from the rocks above him, “Dr. McKay!”

“Oh my god, Teyla!” Rodney ran forward, picking his way through the bodies and around the bend. He skidded to a stop. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, I am fine,” Teyla said quickly, taking the rifle from him and offering him a hand to pull him up the rocks. Her eyes were bright and furious but she was pale under her usual tan, and as he watched she breathed in slow shallow breathes, swallowing like someone afraid she might throw up if given the chance.

“Oh,” Rodney said, squinting, “well, you look horrible.” 

She shot him a narrow glare, which wasn’t even worth acknowledging. There was a sand dollar sized bruise on her cheek, which was. Rodney had a horrible moment when he remembered the bruising on the Latere by the truck and he thought Teyla’d been in the tunnel when he--“Um,” he said, gesturing wildly at his own face. Teyla touched her cheek, gently probing with the pads of her fingers. 

“There were... Latere along my path,” she said, not sounding disappointed at all. She returned the Latere rifle and turned purposefully up the path. “This way. How is your aim?”

“Aim?” Rodney repeated, horrified, as he ran after her.

“There are four soldiers left with Panlow. I still did not see the Colonel.”

“Oh. Well. Disappearing body ritual, of course.”

Teyla slanted a look at him, but she only gestured for silence and they hurried on.

At the top of the ridge, they crouched behind a rise of rock, peering over it at a long rope bridge and the five Latere milling about at its edge, three of them with their backs to the Atlanteans. 

“Are you ready?” Teyla asked, and then without waiting for the question, grabbed the rifle barrel and manually pointed it at the Latere. “Do not worry about hitting them, but attract them here.”

There’d been a brief moment there, when he’d seen Teyla above him on the rocks, that he hadn’t been terrified anymore. Lifting the rifle and pretending he knew how to use it, he reflected miserably that that moment was over. 

One of the Latere was at the end of the bridge, like he was supposed to be watching their back, but something interesting must be happening at the center of the bridge, because he kept turning around to look behind him. Of the other four, Panlow and two others, were clustered around some structure at the center of the bridge, right at the railing. The fifth was at the front of the group, watching the other island.

Rodney’s first shot hit nothing at all that he could tell, but the gun’s sharp report had Latere whipping around, hands on weapons, dropping into a crouch and hugging the sides of the bridge. He noticed Panlow towards the back, unimpressed by the two Latere attempting to block the incoming fire with their bodies, lifting her own rifle to scan the rocky landscape as carefully as those under her command. 

Rodney’s second shot ripped up the ground at the mouth of the bridge, scattering dirt onto the boot of the soldier creeping towards the cover of the rocks and causing him to flinch back violently. Rodney took a breath and tried to be glad Sheppard wasn’t there because obviously Rodney didn’t have the aim required to miss him on purpose.

His third shot clipped Panlow’s shoulder, earning Rodney a shouted curse and bringing a rush of adrenalin-charged satisfaction that steadied his aim. Then Teyla’s hand on his shoulder, “That will do for now, Dr. McKay.” 

He blinked. “What? I can do it, I was getting better--” A shot pinged against the rock next to his hand. “Ow! Oh my god!” Teyla dragged him down. 

“Wait there,” she said. “Fire only if it becomes necessary.” This time she put the pistol in his hand. She stood, and she was holding two solid sticks as the Latere came cautiously around the corner. 

The first took a solid hit to the gut and doubled over, followed by an almost absent-minded one-handed blow to the head, Teyla already moving on to strike at the neck of the second. She ducked with the falling bodies as the third soldier came around the corner, weapon raised but unable to immediately decipher which body was his enemy before Teyla took out his legs.

With three unconsicious Latere, at their feet, Rodney and Teyla--alright mostly Teyla--talked down the remaining two Latere, including Panlow, whose right arm was hanging uselessly at her side. Rodney’s aim was better, or luckier, than he’d thought.

“Not what I expected,” Panlow said with false casualness as Teyla tied her hands and put a field bandage on her arm. Rodney glared at her from where he stood with his pistol aimed carefully at the head of one of the fallen Latere.

“Obviously," Rodney said, "you should never underestimate genius. Not that you’re the first, of course, so we’re just lucky I’m around to take advantage of it.”

“Where is Colonel Sheppard?” Teyla asked. She stood awkwardly, brushing a hand over her forehead and breathing heavily. Rodney was torn between which team member he was supposed to worry about saving.

Panlow looked straight at Rodney. “Where are Senator Barr and the men guarding him? Where are my wounded? Are they unharmed?”

Rodney stared at her. “Are the wounded unharmed? No, no, they’re not--” he stopped. “I... yes. I think they’re alive. I let them out so they could get to your city for medical treatment.” 

Panlow obviously heard the uncertainty in the statement and the implied possibile fatalities because she was glaring all sorts of death at him from her huddle on the ground.

“Where is the Colonel?”

Panlow’s eyes darted back up the path towards the rope bridge and she gave them a snake’s smile. So they tied her feet and her hands and tied all of the Latere together with the plastic loops and nylon cord from Teyla’s pack, wishing fondly for Wraith stunners. Rodney raced ahead, beating Teyla to the bridge, slowing down only as his feet hit wood and the slick surface beneath his feet brought to mind all sorts of doubts about structural instabilities. 

There was no one on the bridge or anywhere he could see, no Sheppard, and then he saw the gallows, the taut rope twisting slowly, and sat down hard.

“Dr. McKay, please be cautious. There may be more Latere,” Teyla gasped, catching up. He turned to look up at her, trying to think of some way to explain gallows and broken neck. 

“We didn’t make it,” Rodney said numbly.

“Panlow may have been lying,” Teyla started stubbornly. She stopped, suddenly swaying into the railing, and Rodney couldn’t for life of him tell if it was the rope or the sickness that did it. 

He heard a sound like a whimper or like someone choking, and started to scramble to his feet-- “Teyla?”

She was bent over the railing, looking down--at the end of the rope, Rodney thought sickly. Rodney reached for her, and she laughed out loud.

“Uh,” Rodney said.

“I think,” she said, amusement in her tone, “that it is safe to look.”

And a distant shout from below: “Hey! I think I found the Ancient outpost! Also, would you pull me up already? I hear there are sharks!”

**

In those puzzling moments of freefall before the rope ran out, John lacked even the ground to keep him company. The end was a sharp, empty instant, ripping his senses from down to stop in no time at all, and he’d never felt so impossibly heavy, like all the mass of the world was hanging off the end of the rope at his shoulder.

“Hey,” he said breathlessly when he was topside again, a little high pitched. He knew he was grinning by the mishapen look of outrage on Rodney’s face as they hauled him over the edge.

But he didn’t care. Finally there was something solid under his feet again and all that extra, impossible weight had faded away. The rope was a limp snake, flopping gracelessly across the damp wooden slats. He sagged sideways into Rodney, feeling wide hands scrambling at this shoulders, pulling back when he hissed in pain, settling instead on his back, his stomach. His right shoulder was a hazy mass of fire and ache surrounded by numbness. 

Christ, it felt like heaven.

“Hey,” he whispered again, because Rodney was looking at him with weirdly round eyes. John pulled away, bent over and taking huge, careful breaths--one, two, three--and feeling Teyla’s hand rest lightly on his back between his shoulder blades.

Okay, it hurt. A lot. And grinning about that might be kinda freaky, but Rodney’s face was kinda the best toy in Pegasus after the puddlejumpers. And that thought made peek to his left at Rodney and grin again.

Wow, John, he said to himself, really thought you’d bought it there. 

“You’re mentally deficient,” Rodney snapped. “Not to mention your apparent inability to comprehend pain.”

“Right.” John picked at the rope knotted around his wrist, trying not to jar his shoulder. “Help me with this?” he said plaintively. 

Teyla’s expression burst into a smile, “Of course, Colonel,” she said, deft fingers picking at the knots. “We are both glad you are safe.”

Rodney kept darting glances inland. “Happy reunion notwithstanding, I propose we not hang around in the open area we know can be successfully ambushed.”

“There are Latere guarding the stargate,” Teyla said. “By now they may be more heavily armed.”

“Also, I got shot in the leg,” John offered helpfully. He yanked at the velcro on a lower pocket of Rodney’s vest with his left hand, looking for a field bandage. “I have an idea about cover though.”

“Hey, grabby hands, grabby hands!” Rodney snapped, batting at John, which was better than grimacing at the rope wrapped around John’s right wrist. When they’d pulled him over the edge, John hadn’t been prepared for the open mix of fear and relief on Rodney’s face. He thought they’d moved past it though, with the snapping and the hitting, but instead of letting John get his own damn bandage, Rodney made him limp over to sit behind an outcropping of rocks, and then he wrapped the thing around John’s calf himself. With Teyla still working at his rope-bound wrist, it felt oddly like a manicure/pedicure. Possibly there should be palm fronds--and grapes.

“You got word to Atlantis?” John said, in lieu of casting suspicious glances at Rodney’s bowed head.

“Yes,” Teyla said. “Though... they do not know of the Laterian betrayal.”

“Well,” John hedged, “I wouldn’t call it a betrayal. We did a pretty good job of freaking them out.” He was glad he was sitting down; it made it easier to resist the urge to shift sheepishly from foot to foot. “Unintentionally,” he added quickly.

Rodney scoffed, neatly tying the ends of the bandage. John had no idea if Rodney was scoffing with him or at him.

Teyla eyed him, continuing, “They were readying a second team in the event that we encountered trouble...”

“But we have no way of telling them we need it,” Rodney finished, sitting back with a groan.

“Perhaps they will send the team anyway when we do not check in.”

“Yes, in several hours. We can’t wait around here! There are six Latere headed here to check up on Panlow, not to mention that there are still at least fifty of them hanging around the island! Wait,” Rodney gestured impatiently at John with a crooked thumb, “what did you say about an Ancient outpost.”

“Underside of the cliff,” John said. “A few picture windows, nice balcony, door. Probably be pretty easy to swing over to it with that rope--this rope.” He nodded at the rope Teyla was pulling gently from his wrist, wincing to see the skin beneath it raw and red.

“Well, if it’s that obvious there’s no doubt they know about it.” Rodney started poking at his tac vest, but after an opaque glance at John, he switched pockets, finally pulling out the Ancient scanner triumphantly. “And you want an astrophysicist, a gimp, and an invalid to Tarzan across to it on a rope.”

John frowned at Teyla, who had the grace to blush, the color in her cheeks giving her a momentary appearance of health. “Why didn’t you stay behind with Beckett?” 

“Any discomfort disappeared the moment I stepped through the Stargate,” Teyla protested calmly, “suggesting that the problem lies with this planet. I could not leave you and Dr. McKay in the middle of an unknown danger without warning you. Then, when I contacted you...” She let the sentence trail off.

John cleared his throat. “Glad you came back.”

Teyla nodded, satisfied. There was a stoic pause, then she jumped forward, smiling as she bent to press her forehead to his happily. Oh come on, John thought uncomfortably, I’m not even half as dead as usual.

“Excuse me,” Rodney said. “Your idea? Still moronic.”

“Rodney,” John said. “Ancient outpost.”

That got a pause. Ancient technology was McKay’s irresistable lure. Rodney cleared his throat awkwardly, eyes darting away from John’s while his hands squeezed the scanner in a jerky rhythm. 

“Yes, well, it’s probably empty. I don’t think we need to explore it,” Rodney lied through his teeth. John stared. “We could--we could come back,” Rodney added defensively.

“What’s your LSD tell you, McKay?” John said, feeling kind of juvenile. It occurred to him after he said it that it was actually Ford’s joke, and that didn’t improve his mood any.

Rodney glared at him. “It tells me we’re in an incredibly lush environment where these readings are almost--” He looked at the screen and his face fell. “And part of the lush environment is definitely moving this way. Probably with guns.”

“Okay,” John said. “Over the edge then.”

“Still a stupid idea!”

“Rodney,” John said strongly, earning a brief respite. “We’re in no shape to make a run on the gate. Aside from the leg wound, we...” he gritted his teeth around the admission, “have no idea if anything else is wrong with me.”

Rodney pulled back at that, startled. John remembered waking up in Rodney’s lap with Rodney’s hand resting on his shoulder. That could have been pretty terrifying from the other perspective. He ran a hand through his hair, covertly checking for a bump or a bruise or, you know, leaking brain juices. It was starting to worry him more than he’d like to admit. There was no way he was making a run on the gate with his team only to collapse in the middle of it.

“On the other hand,” Rodney said hurriedly, eyes skating away from John’s, “an ancient viewing gallery on the underside of a cliff, especially if inaccessible except by rope, would offer a good defensible position until reinforcements arrive.”

John squinted at him. “Okay,” he said. “Teyla, if you’re feeling up to it, you should probably go first. I’ll go next--”

“One handed?” Rodney demanded.

“--and probably get some really bad rope burn. Mckay, despite being--your words by the way--an astrophysicist, you’re the healthiest guy here at the moment, so you’re bringing up the rear.” 

“Joy,” Rodney said, still casting dubious glances between John’s shoulder and leg.

They went back to the railing, peering speculatively down at the water. Teyla dropped the rope, now freed from John’s wrist, back over the edge, swinging over the railing herself and shimmying down with disgusting ease. From the top, Rodney and John tried to help her get it swinging, but mostly they had to leave it up to Teyla’s strength and natural coordination. Rodney muttered something about lever-arms, directed at John, and John didn’t mention that yes, he’d covered torque in high school and again in college and that he even knew how to calculate cross products.

Like a kid on a swing set, Teyla worked her way up to a respectable arc, until with each swing she passed out of John’s view underneath the cliff. He leaned out over the railing, trying to catch a glimpse of the installation, but was eventually satisfied that the Latere couldn’t see the outpost from the bridge. And considering its difficult to reach location, they might reasonably assume it wasn’t the Atlanteans first choice for hideouts. 

After the third swing the rope didn’t swing back. “Teyla?” John called carefully. He was keeping an eye on either end of the bridge, but so far it remained empty. 

“Oh,” Rodney said, “right. Here.” He held out the radio the Latere had taken. John hooked it around his ear, flicked it on.

“I have made it,” Teyla’s voice said into his ear, fiercely proud and out of breath.

“Well, send the rope back,” Rodney hissed, glancing up the path.

“How’s it look?” John asked.

“It appears safe and structurally intact. I will send the rope back after I have--there.” They saw the rope swing back from underneath the cliff.

“Alright then,” John said, his voice coming out strained, thinking he’d lie down on the damp slats of the bridge and catch a quick nap until the Latere came rather than go over that railing again.

“Guess we shouldn’t have pulled you up after all,” Rodney muttered, staring miserably at the end of the rope maybe twenty feet below. “You know, I had to climb ropes in P.E. as part of a yearly fitness test.”

“Relax, McKay,” John said, taking a breath and a mental step back. He grabbed the rope near the wooden base with his good hand, stepping over the rail. “I’m sure this isn’t the moment your crappy gym grade from a few decades ago comes back to haunt you.”

“What?" Rodney said. "No, I excelled. I made it to the ceiling, even, to the detriment of Ms. Pierpont’s nerves. Huh,” he stared thoughtfully at the bridge slats while John looped one foot in the rope and started to slide down, “probably because I was so skinny.”

When John neared the end, his shoulder aching and heat in his left palm, he realized that the reason for Teyla’s delay in returning the rope was the thin, nylon cord stretching from the end of the Laterian rope to her hands. He saw her with her feet braced against the low stone edge of the Ancient balcony, starting to reel him in hand over hand, muscles bunching in her arms and legs.

“Nice idea,” John said, when they were both sitting on the rocky floor, a mosaic of curling sea green waves beneath them and his shoulder throbbing in time with his pulse. He set his teeth, taking a slow, careful breath through his mouth. 

Teyla dipped her head in acknowledgement.

The balcony centered around four squat doors set into the cliff behind them, thick with colored panes of opaque glass, one door hanging precariously open. The rock around them was wet with salt water, dripping slowly from the green moss growing along the underside of the cliff hiding the Latere’s wooden bridge from sight. 

John wondered if they’d be able to close the broken door behind them. They needed to do at least some minimal exploring as soon as Rodney was safely down, to check for a back entrance the Latere might pop out of unexpectedly.

“I assume you’re both alive?” asked John’s radio irritably.

“Pretty much,” John agreed. 

Teyla kept her head down, staring at the water. Her expression was as still as it often was, and something made him think he was seeing the calm before the storm.

“You okay?” John asked lamely. “We’re going to have to pull McKay in, but after that, passing out is totally okay with me.”

“I sense Wraith,” Teyla said instead.

Oh yeah, he thought, his pulse sky rocketing, the calm before the melanin-challenged, life-sucking storm. He rolled to his feet and pushed up with his good arm, eyes scanning what he could see of the sky past the overhanging cliff.

“Where? Close?” he asked sharply, tapping his radio. “McKay, we’ve got Wraith.”

Rodney’s voice, thin and reedy through the radio: “Wraith? Now? I’m hanging on a rope! I’m dead!”

The sky was overcast and grey; it was also empty. The darts could be above the clouds, easily, but they were thankfully loud and largely useless for any kind of stealthy approach. Wraith lived in spaceships, so the only means of travel they seemed to have developed were by air in darts or by ground on foot. He didn’t think drones walking could have snuck up on them so fast. 

“Calm down,” John said, gaze fixed on the nylon cord that ran from his left fist to the Latere rope bouncing with McKay’s weight, thinking he could panic enough for the both of them, just this once. “Just make to the end without falling off. Teyla--”

She was still sitting at the edge, staring downwards. John stopped, left hand raised to his ear. She said flatly, “I sense Wraith in the water.”

John let that process for a moment. “Wraith... fish?” He hit the radio again. “Rodney. The Wraith might be in the water. Don’t come down here--”

“Yes, obviously I should go buddy-buddy with the Latere. Sorry, there’s no way I can climb back up this thing, and don’t even try to convince me you could manage it--”

“It does not feel right,” Teyla interrupted. John didn’t think she’d been paying attention to the conversation. Her head was tilted slightly to the side, her expression tight. She sounded annoyed, like she was at the end of her patience with a misbehaving child. “The pain is constant and disorienting; I have felt several times as though I might vomit, but I do not usually feel this way when they are near.” She added almost casually, “Perhaps this is how the Wraith feel when I enter their minds by force.”

For a moment, John had no response at all, just the silence of the wind and the regular sound of waves hitting the rocks.

“What?” Rodney demanded, “What did she say? You didn’t get eaten by Wraith sharks did you? I wasn’t kidding when I said I couldn’t climb up this, you’d better be alive--”

“We’re getting the hell off this planet as soon as Atlantis shows up,” John muttered darkly, rubbing his face with the hand holding the rope. “Sorry. Do you,” and hell, this was hard to say, “do you think you’ve been compromised?”

“No,” Teyla replied immediately.

“I’m at the bottom, now what do I do?” Rodney said in a rush. “Seriously, are you alive?”

“Yes, Mckay,” John said patiently. “We’re alive.” He turned around and waved at the scientist, who was hanging a dozen yards away at the end of the big rope, staring fixedly at the rocky water below him, the Latere rifle hooked onto his backpack. Rodney jerked his head up when John spoke, obviously hearing the echo from John and the radio speaking at once.

“Oh,” he said, breathless. “There you are. I see you.”

“And without the lampreys in bad wigs, even,” John deadpanned.

“Right, right,” Rodney agreed, nodding sincerely.

Sometimes John doubted the whole genius thing a little.

Teyla stood, looking like she was staving off collapse long enough to help John drag Rodney over. John really wasn’t any help at all, unable to use his dominant arm. Rodney looked pale and terrified. John didn’t feel bad about either, because all Rodney needed to do right now was not let go of the rope, and terror was a pretty good motivator for that.

Rodney was maybe less than two feet away from the ledge, already reaching out a foot to hook on the stone lip, when Teyla made a sound like someone gagging on a scream and sagged into the John’s side, the thin rope running through her hands like water. 

Rodney dropped several feet instantly. His eyes went round, startled but not panicked, like he was looking into the face of the inevitable, and that was annoying because John knew Rodney never gave up.

“No,” John said blankly, and without thinking, looped the rope around his left wrist twice, twisting it around his hand and closing his fist. The rope skidded over his skin, wrenching him forward. Teyla slipped down his back, an arm hooked over his hip, fist closed in his jacket. John threw himself backwards, bent double with his feet braced against the stone lip of the balcony, right arm uselessly propped against his thigh, and his ass so low it was almost touching the floor, letting his weight and Teyla’s join the tug of war.

“Oh god,” Rodney said, staring at the water, limbs wrapped tightly around the rope.

“Don’t look down!” John yelled, furious, “Don’t you fucking dare look down!” and Rodney jerked his face back to stare at him, mouth gaping. John only had one good arm, he couldn’t pull Rodney up, could only keep him from slipping further back. “Just hang on,” John said, more quietly. 

“You don’t--Sheppard look.”

John glanced down, but he was too low to see the water directly below Rodney and the balcony. Rodney twitched like he was desperately trying not to look again, like he could barely keep himself from doing it. John snarled and Rodney threw his head back to center.

“It’s huge,” he babbled, “one of those looming, just under the surface shadows, and I don’t mean awe-inspiring whale shadows where you’re happy there’s one under the boat, though I don’t see how that makes sense, when there’s a leviathan coming to say--can I look? Just a little, to see if it’s coming to eat me, really, I’d like to know--”

“No,” John said tightly, left armed aching much as his right. The rope felt like a hot, spiraling wound in his flesh. “Teyla,” he said urgently, “Teyla.”

He heard her retch, her arm tightening around his waist, body shuddering, then the acrid stench of vomit. 

“I hope you don’t have to sit in that,” Rodney said, a little hysterically. He was so close, if John wasn’t a moron, hadn’t fallen off a bridge by accident--

“Teyla,” John said, strained, “I could really use--Rodney’s going to be eaten by a Wraith shark if you don’t--they can jump pretty high--”

“Oh, thanks!” Rodney yelled.

Her hand tightened in his vest, pulling herself up past his shoulder, bruised and pale. “Yes,” she said, and wrapped her hand around the rope past John’s arm in one smooth motion, beginning draw it in with painful slowness, hand over hand. John slid his grip forward with every inch of rope she pulled in, holding the ground she’d already won.

When Rodney got close enough, John grabbed his ankle as Rodney walked his hands down the rope, letting John pull him fully onto the small balcony. When his head passed the edge, finally, he released the rope all in one motion and scooted away from the edge as fast as possible before he dared to sit up. 

Teyla rolled onto her side and laid her head on the cool mosaic tile, eyes closed.

“Way not to fall,” John said, shaking with exhaustion and probably shock. Hours, he thought numbly, we’ve got hours until Atlantis shows up. And since it would be Elizabeth making the call, who wasn’t military, there was no clear protocol for exactly how many hours it would be. 

“Like riding a bicycle,” Rodney said weakly, casting anxious glances over his shoulder.

John reached out, put a hand on Teyla’s ankle gently. He said, not gently at all, “Inside. Now.”

Teyla’s expression was flat with anger, but she sat up and took the end of the rope from him, rolling up the nylon cord in quick precise movements before letting the Latere rope fall back to dangle beneath the gallows. John didn’t like being stranded, but it would have been too obvious where they’d gone, and they couldn’t get back that way anyway, and--Atlantis would come. Soon enough.

He got a hand under Teyla’s arm, even though she hated it, and together they stumbled towards the door. 

John didn’t know if the Ancient installation had started out as a natural cave, but at some point the Ancients had taken tools to the stone, smoothing it into straight, geometric lines. From inside, the windows were obviously transparent, if foggy, spilling colored light onto the organic debris gathering in the corners. He pulled out a canteen, let Teyla rinse her mouth out. He was briefly grateful he couldn’t smell the vomit in here.

“No energy readings--except for the super bridges--no significant life signs in front of us, nada,” Rodney said, almost evenly. “There’s too much behind us, vegetation in the water, fish, etc. It doesn’t make exceptions for sea monsters.”

“Could it have been a machine? Like a sub?” John studied him carefully, looking for injury or hurt. It was a luxury he didn’t indulge in often, really looking to see his people were all right, but the room was dim, Rodney lit eerily by the glow of the scanner’s screen, and John figured almost being shark bait warranted a good long look. 

“It was a menacing shadowy shape, you think I know?” Rodney retorted, voice cracking. He was cupping the scanner in his hands rather than holding it, like his fingers and palms were tender after refusing to let go. “I assume I’d be getting some kind of energy readings if it were.”

John didn’t know which option he liked better. Well, actually--sea monster, obviously. Sharks stopped being scary pretty quickly once you were out of their reach. If there were a vector field for shark fear, it’d have a discontinuity at the water’s surface. Then he started wondering about the integral of shark flux through the closed surface of the cave and figured he’d better stop before he gave all of Maxwell’s equations a Jaws theme and accidentally mentioned it to McKay, earning the mockery of the science team.

“Teyla, you still getting Wraith?”

“I...” She was frowning at the entrance, her anger unfocused with no obvious target to blame. She looked just as angry with herself actually, for being unable to give a definite answer. “I... am uncertain.”

“Rodney saw something in the water. Something big. That have anything to do with it?” Teyla just looked at him wearily, so John asked, “Are we moving away from it at least?”

“I do not know,” Teyla admitted.

John sighed, thinking that over. He’d decided they couldn’t make for the gate themselves, choosing to wait for rescue, and now he needed to find them someplace safe to do it. Between armed hostiles, an unexplored Ancient installation, and possibly Wraith sharks, he was beginning to doubt his chances. Moving farther away from the Latere and from whatever Teyla had sensed from the water was pretty appealing, but since when was he brain dead enough to think unexplored, abandoned Ancient outposts made for nice, friendly hideouts?

“If we don’t know anything, at the very least we need to explore the rest of the outpost,” Rodney said quickly, echoing John’s wishful thinking. He gestured with the scanner. “Can you close that door?”

John studied the door and its frame, unusually dark given the Ancient’s fondness for lighting weapons and toasters up like Christmas. “I don’t think there’s any power getting to it--”

“I meant by pushing it.” Rodney sighed. Obviously, perceived stupidity in the people around him bucked him right up. John watched, unable to keep from smiling a little, as Rodney stuffed the scanner into a pocket, grumbling to himself and handing off the Latere rifle to Teyla, who was shining her light on the beginnings of a winding stair descending into darkness. “Here, let me help you and your gimp leg.”

It gave a nerve-wrecking screech as it slid across the floor, but the door closed easily once it had John and Rodney’s combined weight resting against it. 

“I don’t think there’s a way to lock it,” John said, lifting a hand to his right shoulder, painful and unhappy even though John had shoved against the door with his good side. The graze on his calf dimmed in comparison.

“Ah, I think I can handle that,” Rodney said, sounding sort of pleasantly surprised with himself. He made an aborted motion with his hand towards the front of his vest but stopped suddenly with his hand on the closed flap of one of the front pockets and turned to John with an expression of dismay. John stared at him, clueless. Usually Rodney’s expressions were so transparent John was embarrassed on his behalf.

“You can or you can’t?” John asked carefully. “I lost my power bars with my tac vest, McKay. You’ll have to hold off hypoglycaemia for now.”

“No,” Rodney said decisively, jerking his chin up. “I can’t. I already told you there are no energy readings in this facility. Like you said, Colonel, there’s no power.”

“Damn it,” John swore. They needed a defensible position, but one that wouldn’t be too inaccessible to the back up Atlantis was going to send. “Okay, stay here,” John ordered. “Both of you. I want to know if this installation shields RF.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“Just down the stairs a bit, Rodney. Maybe twenty yards, see if there’s interference of any kind.”

Rodney peered down the staircase spiraling into the dark. The ceiling was high, the walls inset with strange shells and bones, relics of an alien sea. “It curves. You want to walk out of sight in the unexplored Ancient outpost, then find out if your radio works.”

“McKay. If you don’t hear from me in thirty seconds. You have my permission to freak out. Now, give me your flashlight.” 

“Here, Colonel,” Teyla said, and handed him a Latere sidearm. 

He took it, limping towards the stair before Rodney could think up a protest. No lights came on as he descended, wincing at the twinges of pain it caused in his leg. The center of each step dipped with the passage of many feet over thousands of years, nothing like Atlantis’ unchanging halls.

He made three turns, counted thirty seconds, and tapped his radio. “McKay, this is Sheppard. What did the fish say when it ran into a wall?”

“What?” Rodney’s irritated voice came through clearly. John felt some of his tension ease. “Did you seriously--”

“It’s alright, McKay,” John drawled. “You don’t have to guess. You just say, ‘I don’t know, what?’ and then I say--”

“Damn,” Rodney snapped. “That’s the answer.”

“Aw, you’re supposed to stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

“ _Shut up._ Forcing me to waste my considerable intellect answering popsicle-stick jokes has to qualify as a misuse of resources. Are there aliens? Large teeth, dripping jowls, automatic weaponry?”

John swung the flashlight beam across the stairwell, so far free of doors, windows, or anything but the remains of dead sea life. “Just mollusks. Come on. Let’s find a better place to hole up and wait.”

“And possibly a ZPM.” Rodney sounded suddenly excited. 

“Yeah,” John agreed tiredly, resting his back gratefully against the smooth wall. “One of those would be nice.”

**  
Rodney had meant to explain at length Sheppard’s error in mistaking obviously extensive brain damage for a sense of humor; instead, he was staring at the closed door with its red and amber panes, thinking distantly: So that’s why there wouldn’t be a body. 

Teyla had her eye on the door too, P90 raised like she expected a lumbering shark-man-thing to burst through at any moment, though he’d caught her just a minute ago rubbing one eye sleepily, head drooping towards the wall. It was--strangely adorable, but also worrying. Rodney bounced away from the wall towards the stairs.

“Are you coming?” he demanded.

Her returning glare as she followed him down was reassuring, and he experienced a feeling of surprise disconnected from the current circumstances. Something like realizing all over again (he usually did so at least once a week) that even though the members of his team were nothing like anybody he had known before--and he had been a part of some very odd friendships in the past--they were probably the most important people in his life. Ever.

They descended into darkness, lit only by the harsh lights of Teyla’s P90 lamp and Rodney’s slim flashlight. He’d reattached the rifle to the backpack because it wasn’t the kind of gun he trusted himself to use in the narrow turns of the stairwell. They had been traveling markedly longer that thirty seconds when the next curve of the spiral revealed Sheppard, standing with his back against the wall, his head tipped back wearily. 

“Ends a few more turns down,” Sheppard said, and--there!--closed his eyes, like now that Rodney and Teyla were there he could take a quick nap. Rodney had really had enough of Sheppard napping today. 

“Did you see anything the Ancients left behind?”

Sheppard stared. “Like this whole facility?”

“Do I look like an anthropologist?” Rodney snapped.

“Pretty small room at the bottom.” Sheppard shrugged. “Didn’t check it out.” 

“We should go,” Teyla said suddenly, startling them.

“Okay.” Sheppard pulled himself away from the wall, and they started down, Teyla at their back, glancing suspiciously upwards.

The stairwell emptied onto another mosaic floor in a smallish rectangular room. The opposite wall showed a pattern of imprinted steel rectangles that if powered, Rodney knew would hide a glowing maze of crystal circuits. The light here was no longer so oppressively dark, lit by a diffuse glow from the archway kitty-corner to the stairwell. Rodney’s scanner still picked up no significant power readings. Two matching, solid looking doors occupied the remaining walls opposite each other, suggesting that there was a hallway that ran through here.

In the antechamber, Sheppard said, “I need to do something about this shoulder.”

Rodney stared at him.

“It dislocated when I fell,” Sheppard clarified, like Rodney was a moron.

“Yes, trust me, Colonel, I have seen enough sweaty action movies to--Teyla, the Colonel needs you to beat him up, again.”

Sheppard looked ready to explain, but Teyla, worn and weary, said mildly, “It is alright, Dr. McKay. My people also have human bodies and suffer the same injuries.”

Her voice was rich with Teyla’s own brand of sarcasm, which the uninitiated often mistook for sincerity and which Rodney suspected was the Athosian version of I’m surrounded by idiots.

Rodney hmphed. He knew a “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” when he heard it. “I didn’t say--I’ll just leave you to it then,” and wandered towards the archway, holding the scanner and casting suspicious glances back over his shoulder.

He heard Sheppard’s voice backpedaling: “We can just leave it. You can really mess something up if--”

And Teyla, with iron kindness: “I have done this before.” 

Rodney hurried forward--out of sight, out of mind--shining his flashlight through the glass of the closed door. This glass was clear and uncolored and Rodney could see through to a curving, empty hall. The archway to his right led to a short set of a dozen steps leading down.

Rodney had considered all this with only mild interest until he saw the way the light on the steps rippled and moved. Aquariums and swimming pools came to mind, but so did hollow, mechanical monstrosities winding through an alien ocean and the malevolent shadows just under its surface.

It hit him suddenly (a little late) that, oh god, he was the healthiest person here, on a planet with quite possibly Wraith in scuba gear, walking into an unexplored alien room which appeared to be underwater. If he’d been thinking Sheppard and Teyla would save him from the giant life-sucking amphibious leviathans of the deep--probably with tentacles and paralyzing slime--he was tragically wrong. 

Oh. Panic. God, where have you been?

Behind him, he heard Sheppard grunt as Teyla did something properly Xena-like to his injured shoulder. Rodney drew his sidearm, stepping cautiously onto the first stair, bending to peek below the top of the arch into the room.

And stopped, staring despite himself.

“Hey, McKay,” Sheppard said, breathless. “Hang back a bit.”

“No,” Rodney said. “Shut up for a second.” The room was circular and enormous, a giant upturned bowl, mosaics of waves and sea life spilling through the doorway around the edges of the floor, creeping up the walls. 

The centerpiece, though, was the window.

It took up more than half the floor, set into a low metal platform. What he could see of the view from his position halfway down the stairs was ocean and rock, the underside of a rocky cliff. Sea grasses waved slowly in the current. Teyla appeared at his shoulder, irritation fading in favor of awe.

“I have never seen anything...” she faltered. “We did not live near the ocean on Athos, and on Atlantis, sometimes it is easy to forget that we are near the sea.”

“I don’t forget,” Sheppard put in, unconcerned. Rodney tore his gaze away from the window. Sheppard was standing in the corner of the little anteroom, gingerly zipping up his expedition jacket with his right arm bent carefully across his stomach. He couldn’t see into the big room to see what they were looking at. “What are we talking about?” 

Rodney walked to the edge of the window, looking through the--it couldn’t be glass. The surface of the window sloped upwards, slightly convex, distorting the world outside into something huge and warped at the edges. He watched something mammal-like dart by, bubbles trailing from its fur on its way to the sea floor, which he could begin to make out some 30 meters below.

“Is she done hurting you yet?” Rodney asked seriously. “You want to see this.”

“I am done,” Teyla said, behind him. She sounded like she was turned away from him, maybe sharing a weary smirk with Sheppard.

Rodney meant to snap something like, “I’m glad I came along to provide some amusement,” but when he looked up, Sheppard was wandering aimlessly down the steps, blinking widely at the round room, lifting his head to take in the vaulted ceiling with its dancing, watery reflections.

“So,” he said, “what did you want me to see?”

“What do you mean what did I want you to see?” Rodney threw his arms jerkily apart, lit from below with shifting blue light. “Did you miss the giant _underwater window_ in the floor?”

“No, that’s pretty cool. See any Wraith sharks?” Sheppard walked up to the window slowly, looking like he wanted to tap it with his foot.

“Don’t touch it,” Rodney hissed, strangled. He stared downwards but could see nothing but small bright fish and seaweed and the one alien seal. 

Sheppard said, “You think we can get eaten by Wraith sharks in here?”

Rodney lifted the scanner. “I have no idea. By all means, please experiment--” Sheppard leaned forward “--oh god, you are damaged! Against the wall now! Unless I say otherwise!”

Unexpectedly, Sheppard burst into a laugh. “Can you tell if the Latere are looking for us yet?” he asked, at odds with his grin, propping one foot on the raised window platform and not taking a step back at all. There was something breathless and daring in his expression, like he was the one getting a rush off of their near brush with death, which was so miserably unfair since it had been Rodney’s brush with death, really, and Sheppard didn’t need help with his reckless urges.

“No,” Rodney said. “That staircase was six or seven floors, at least. The resolution won’t be high enough at this distance to distinguish between humans and trees.”

Despite Sheppard’s initial willingness to hang out in plain view like the Atlantean Buffet Special (low fat, low carb), they mostly skirted around the window, exploring the rest of the room. There were four exits from the window room. First, the way they came in. The other three were all clumped at the other side of the circular chamber. Each led to a short ascending flight of stairs about the height of the doorway.

His scanner beeped fortuitously, directing him towards a dark console at the edge of the window. There were no dust covers here, and he used his sleeve to polish a collection of grime off the surface of the controls. The console and the metal window platform were both adorned with geometric etchings in a clear Atlantean style separate from the patterned waves and animals of the mosaic floors. This outpost had not gone undiscovered by subsequent inhabitants of this world. 

Rodney ached to bring out the datasquare, to unfold it and coax out the secrets of the dome room and the ocean window, but if he took it out and Sheppard saw it--Sheppard was anything but stupid, and Rodney couldn’t imagine how he’d answer Sheppard’s questions when Rodney couldn’t explain to himself why he’d done it. 

He could apologize, he supposed, but he’d always been a terrible liar.

The equipment, surprisingly, was in admirable shape, though unpowered. Rodney wondered if the Latere had studied this place, if they’d protected it and preserved it, then had to remove all signs of their attention as they’d removed signs of their progress from the surface of the islands, if the grime on his sleeve had been carefully applied by a Laterian technician.

Rodney had pried a large panel off the back of the console and was head and shoulders deep in alien circuity--mostly so he could open the database square in secret--so Sheppard’s voice bursting in suddenly made him jerk up, fumbling to hide the square (and failing) and slamming his head against the top of the console.

Sheppard reported that, from what he could see, the other rooms were dead ends and appeared to be Ancient labs of some kind. “I think there’s a corridor looping around the main room and connecting the labs, but the only door I could get open just shows me fifty feet of empty hallway to the next locked door.”

“Ow, ow, ow!” Rodney said, but he hadn’t keyed his radio and Sheppard wasn’t listening. 

“Are you all right, Doctor?” Teyla asked from outside the console.

“Do I sound--oh, oh, wait, is this some alternative Pegasus Galaxy definition of ow?” Rodney wondered aloud, extracting himself from the console’s innards. “Because the linguists would--”

Teyla was staring at the database square resting folded in his hand. Rodney froze.

“Did Dr. Zelenka not ask you to leave the square behind on this mission?” Teyla asked, more curious than critical. She still seemed drained, some part of the stillness of her posture feeling forced, like she had to concentrate on her balance to keep from falling.

Rodney swallowed, fingers worrying the edge of the square. “I deemed the risk necessary for the advancement of our scientific knowledge. My judgment was correct as usual,” he added, because as long as he concentrated on escaping the tunnels and not on getting captured in the first place, well, it was a damn good thing he had it, really. “It displays an extremely useful ability to interface with the Ancient technology on this world.”

In defiance, and because a quick review of events since they’d recovered Sheppard suggested that Teyla didn’t know about Sheppard’s fainting spell, Rodney smoothed the black square over the tiled floor, studying it at his leisure. He tapped on the second working category, the one which had shown him a suite of interconnecting rooms when he was searching for information on the tunnel system.

The square gave him a layout of the window room and the connecting labs readily enough (Sheppard had been right about the hallway around the circumference of the main room), but could not be coaxed to display further information on the facility. It suggested that Radek was right, and the square was a terminal rather than a database itself. With the outpost powered down, the square might be unable to access the same degree of detailed information that had been so readily available in the marine tunnels.

For the next dozen minutes or so, Rodney traveled back and forth between the console in the window room and the powered down circuits in the antechamber at the base of the stairs, taking careful notes as he began to outline the hardware of the system that had powered the outpost. It was surprisingly intact, given the evidence of tampering in the outward appearance of the facility. The basic information the square could provide suggested that the outpost had been designed to operate on minimal power generated by an environmentally friendly method, something like windmills or solar power. 

The square was unclear on the exact nature of the power source, and anyway, after he’d starting dashing back and forth, Sheppard had come out of the labs to keep an eye out for Latere coming down the stairs and Rodney had had to quickly stash the square away again in one of the pockets of his tac vest.

“Honestly, it shouldn’t be powered down,” Rodney said, sitting with his legs splayed out on the floor in front of the window room console, the scanner and a collection of tools designed for work on ancient circuitry spread out in front of him. “A burned out ZPM would be one thing, but the power source for this facility should be rechargeable--”

“Really?” Sheppard said, having followed him from the antechamber, leaning forward to squint at the complex mess of cables inside the console as if wondering at Rodney’s augur-like ability to read the truth in their entrails. 

“Ah, yes, the, uh, system for delivering power is subtly different than the systems I’ve seen that are supplied by ZPM,” Rodney said awkwardly, because of course he hadn’t divined that, he’d read it off the database square. “Anyway, I can’t see what’s wrong with it. The flaw is obviously small, and could take weeks with a full team of researchers, and it would be more luck than anything, because we’d have to test the integrity of each--oh, wait,” and threw himself back into the open console.

He dropped the flashlight on the floor of the console, angled upwards on the handle of a small screw driver, and picked up two silvery cables, thicker than the others, and hidden in the mass of translucent wires, dangling detached and inert from the ceiling. As he touched their free ends together, the fibers within the cords wound together of their own accord, electricity tingling beneath his fingers. Sitting on the floor outside next to his thigh, the scanner started beeping frantically.

Rodney pulled himself out again with dignity. “Ah, see? Luck.”

Sheppard whistled appreciatively. “So, want to see the labs?”

“Oh,” Rodney said, startled and feeling a little anticlimatic. “Sure.”

The ancient labs turned out to be disturbingly familiar. Three or four long lab benches, with the complex diagnostic equipment integrated directly into the bench and a collection of different apparatus obviously missing vials and tubes for observing reactions of interest.

“The set-up is very similar to the nanovirus labs,” Rodney said thoughtfully. He felt something brush against the back of his neck and realized it was Sheppard’s hand, waiting for a reason to drag Rodney out of there by his collar. Rodney said quickly, “Taken with the underwater viewing gallery, I’m going to assume we’ve found the happy home-away-from-home of Lantean marine biologists. Deadly viral labs seem unlikely.”

“Rodney,” Sheppard said with his hand on the back of Rodney’s neck, sounding a weird mix of wry and deadly serious, “Ancient outpost.”

“Yes, okay,” Rodney admitted, “but really, if nothing else, they were extremely creative, and it’s far more likely that these labs are fantastically dangerous for some other reason entirely.”

Sheppard left him to it, though he hung around just close enough that Rodney left the square in his pocket rather than take it out. He heard the Colonel and Teyla talking once at the door about the Latere, and then Teyla jogged off, apparently going to hang out around the stairs to ensure the Latere weren’t invading just yet. Rodney caught Sheppard limping around out of the corner of his eye and griped at him until Sheppard sat down on the steps with a great show of reluctance, shoulders sagging, and said, “Now see if I ever get up again,” which would have been funnier if it weren’t so obviously true. 

Rodney glared at him and went back to work.

He was halfway through attempting to categorize the function of the equipment integrated into the first lab bench when a thought occurred to him, and he turned around and stomped past a surprised John Sheppard down the steps into the window room. Across the wide window taking up most of the floor, Teyla turned in the archway to the antechamber, looking at him curiously, the dark circles under her eyes apparent even at a distance.

“This is ridiculous,” Rodney announced at the end of the window, much aggrieved. “The Latere have a serious sea monster fetish going on, so the big scary things to whom they toss people off of bridges have to be pretty constant. Now, Teyla senses the big scary things as Wraith. But the Wraith can’t be here all the time or the Latere’s plan to hide from them would be a joke from the beginning.”

“Maybe they’re not Wraith,” Sheppard said, sitting on the third step and leaning his good shoulder against the wall. “Panlow said the Wraith don’t like the water on this planet. Maybe they eat Wraith.” The last sentence sounded perversely hopeful. Rodney sympathised, but--

“Try again, Colonel. Animals that size need a huge amount of nourishment. Why specialize in a prey that doesn’t even live on your planet and only stops by a few times a century?”

Sheppard made a disppointed sound. “Hey, Dr. Moerbeke was just talking about the remarkable similarity among wildlife in the Pegasus galaxy. So if there’s one indigenous species with natural psychic abilities...”

Rodney had started rolling his eyes as soon as Sheppard named a biologist. “Dr. Moerbeke was referring to the remarkable similarity between species that can travel through the gate, unlike, say, sea life. Also, despite Teyla’s remarkable talents, the Wraith are the only--” Rodney stopped. John leaned forward, waiting, and Teyla had started walking back towards them curiously. Rodney stared down at the domed window at this feet, hands frozen mid gesture. “I’ll be right back,” he said and dashed past John into the other room.

Behind him he heard John say, “You want to check on him or should I?”

“I will do it,” Teyla said generously.

“No, no,” Rodney was muttering as she approached, “we got it all wrong. Or mostly wrong. And maybe--” he unfolded the data square quickly on top of the lab bench, trusting that Sheppard would be keeping an eye on the other side of the window room. With the power back on, information started scrolling immediately when Rodney clicked into the lab room. Specs on the diagnostic equipment, only half-intelligible, and a list of commands. Some of the physical dials and buttons in the lab appeared corroded. Rodney wondered if he could bypass the manual controls entirely using the square. 

He said, “They were experimenting--altering them.”

Teyla tilted her head, frowning. 

“The Ancients,” Rodney clarified. He saw Sheppard turn to look and subtly slid the square down the counter until it was behind his body in John’s line of sight. “They were studying the sharks. They--there’s also information about Wraith DNA here. It’s a genetic engineering lab. Teyla’s living proof that a crazy Wraith scientist accidentally created a weapon against his species by experimenting on humans. The Ancients did it on purpose. To sharks.”

Teyla turned, not saying anything, and slowly walked down the steps into the window room.

Sheppard said, “Well, that’s... creepy.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Rodney said sarcastically. He walked back along the counter, sliding the data square ahead of him. 

He found a compartment on the underside of the lab bench in the datasquare’s blueprints and began to look through it for some sort of hard memory storage so he could bring the data back to Atlantis. He pushed a sliding panel out of the way and found something much better instead--

“Oh, CRAP,” Sheppard shouted suddenly, leaping up, tumbling into the bigger room and out of sight.

Rodney didn’t think, just bolted after him, stuffing the datasquare in a pocket and hastily unhooking the rifle from his pack, expecting to see a swarm of Latere as he ran down the steps.

Instead, he saw Teyla standing at the apex of the dome, dwarfed by the size of the window and staring down at the glass at her feet.

Beneath her, a behemoth hung suspended in the water like a splinter in honey, the slow swish of its tail stirring the sediment of the ocean floor. The tip of its blunt, gray head bumped at the glass, mouth agape in a nightmare apparition of crimson and double rows of ivory. Dark ridges traced from head to tail like a shark in crocodile clothing.

Rodney blinked at it, impressed in a distant way at the blatant menace and its likely ability to swallow his apartment whole. At its widest point, the creature’s head spanned almost the whole diameter of the circular window, which was itself wider than the length of a city bus. Teyla shifted, boot sliding sideways, gun pointed down reflexively and Rodney hoped she wasn’t disoriented enough to start shooting. The shark gnashed its teeth and shook its head from side to side like an excited dog. At the base of its head, Rodney saw a set of fins like the front flippers of a seal, muscular and clawed.

Sheppard was already at the edge of the window platform, scrambling up awkwardly with one each of usable arms and legs, when the shark pushed upward with one gentle stroke of a hugely powerful tail, ramming the side of its head into the glass. The sound of the impact was deep and low pitched except for the screech of the crocodilian ridges against the glass, reverberating around the hemispherical chamber like a ringing bell.

But other than that, very little happened.

Teyla continued staring downwards, a puzzled look on her face, hardly jostled in her position as king of the mountain. No cracks appeared, no telltale leaks, and Rodney let out a happy laugh, coming forward to lean out over the window, watching the creature’s frustrated contortions. 

“Rodney,” Sheppard warned, obviously torn between which team member to go after first.

“No, look,” Rodney said, tapping the glass and feeling a daring rush of adrenaline when something big enough to swallow his home snapped its teeth at him, “it can’t reach us in here. The Ancients, as you may be aware, had a rather passionate dedication to durability. Why hello there, you wanted to eat me, didn’t you? Ha!”

Sheppard sat down wearily on the edge of the window platform. “Well. That’s--Teyla, what do you think?” He waved a hand. “This guy the Wraith you sensed?”

Teyla looked up at him, eyes dark and wide. Her voice sounded like a restrained scream: “I do not know where we are.” 

Sheppard’s expression went tight.

“On the bright side,” Rodney managed, “we can probably assume that means yes.”

A second shark, less than half the size of the first--probably weighing only as much as two large elephants--sidled up the body of the larger, ducking through the other’s thrashing with menacing ease. It swam straight up to the window, turning sharply to swim along its surface, smooth pale belly exposed to a rapt audience, vanishing off the side of the window. Rodney heard a wrenching creak; the window vibrated under his knees. “What?”

“It pushed something. Like... a lever,” Sheppard said, stretching his body out along the window, cheek pressed to the glass, frowning at something out of Rodney’s view. 

“What? Like deliberately?” Rodney asked incredulously.

“Not sure--” Sheppard shifted his feet, starting to push himself farther up the window dome. Rodney heard water slosh and looked down at Sheppard’s boots, standing in a small but growing pool of water. They exchanged a horrified look.

“It must be--I don’t know--give the monkey a treat if it pushes the right button sort of set up--”

“And what, they passed it down through their rich, oral tradition for ten thousand years!”

“I don’t--! Maybe! They’re psychic Wraith sharks.”

“This didn’t look submersible when we came down here!”

“It didn’t have power when we came down here!”

With the groan and screech of metal on metal and the less impressive squeaks of wet glass, the domed window began to move, tiny founts of water appearing along the edge like from holes in a garden hose. Sheppard threw himself up the incline of the glass, pulling at Teyla, both of them slip-sliding down against a background of whirling fins and flashing teeth, the excitement of predators that knew their prey was no longer quite so out of reach.

“Why is it filling up?” Sheppard demanded, eyes darting between the water frothing over the sides of the window platform and the upturned bowl of the ceiling. “Shouldn’t this be like sticking a cup upside down in the bath?”

“Are you kidding?” Rodney jabbed an arm at the entrance. “That stairway leads straight up to the surface! Even forgetting air pressure, it will fill at least to the height of the door--” which was when he heard the rush of air through vents as something in the ceiling started actively pumping the air out of the chamber. “--oh god,” he finished, running for the control console.

“Wrong way, Rodney!” The Colonel had a hand on Teyla’s bicep, starting to move towards the main stairwell.

“I can stop it!” Rodney was already spreading his hands across the interface, thinking close, close, but the window rotated smoothly away, gaping wide like a moon at half-phase, and the surface of the water boiled upward, spilling furiously over the edge of the platform and across the decorative tile, washing up against the walls. Sheppard had reversed directions and was splashing towards him against the current, knee-deep in sea water, towing Teyla behind with one hand, the other held close at his waist.

“Too late,” Sheppard shouted. “Move!” shoving at Rodney when Rodney would have hung onto the console, unable to tear his eyes away from the foggy shapes of gray heads moving in the roiling water; one merely large, the other a behemoth. 

“MOVE!” Sheppard shouted again, and Rodney did, stumbling towards the archway of the nearest lab, in the opposite direction of the exit, but there was no way to get to it now with the water rising so rapidly.

The window itself was submerged by this point, muffling the roar of the water fountaining in. The smaller predator leapt from the water in a gray crescent, body rolling, hitting the water at the edge of the room with a bellyflopping slap, ridged back protruding from the too-shallow water.

Rodney stared at it, horrifed, Sheppard’s hand rough on his back, pushing him forward. 

The shark lifted its head like a seal, twisting to regard Rodney with one black eye. The frilled gill slits along its neck worked like a bellows, churning the water around it as it awkwardly groped towards them with its muscular flippers and loud slaps of its tail. Soon the water would be deep enough for swimming.

Sheppard threw Rodney onto the stairs of the lab ahead of him, grunting with pain, and reached back for Teyla, who in the whole process hadn’t said a word. Rodney wondered if she knew what was happening, if the damage might be permanent, and suddenly he hated the Ancients as much as he’d ever loved them the first time his hand closed around a green brooch and saw it glow. Rodney splashed forward, yanking frantically at his pockets until his hands closed on the half-folded datasquare. He stumbled backwards, scrolling through menus even as he landed midway up the steps, water sloshing over his shoulders, soaking through his uniform and lapping at his skin. Sheppard pushed Teyla through, falling back for half an instant.

A half an instant was enough for disaster. A door of strong, transparent material slid silkily out of the floor to seal against the ceiling of the arch--with Sheppard still on the other side. Rodney could see the first few seconds when Sheppard, exhausted, in pain, didn’t immediately understand. Then his face closed off in fury and he slammed his palm against the glass, shouting without sound. 

“Oh COME ON,” Rodney screamed, “THAT’S MY TRICK.” He keyed through the outpost’s blueprints at breakneck speed, squeezing desperately at the door command, water beading against the screen from his dripping fingers and his sodden sleeves. Thinking of the likely fatal consequences would require taking the time to properly panic, and by the time he was done, something big and nasty would have already eaten Sheppard.

Error, said the datasquare in its squiggly Ancient text, in the absence of hostile intruders, emergency overrides require a senior command code.

“In the absence--! Stop it, just--stop,” but he was already dropping it with a splash, scrabbling at a wall panel with his fingers and his stubby, chewed-down nails, the datasquare bobbing erratically around his waist, afloat like a lilypad on an angry pond. Teyla huddled on the step above, curled forward with her head against her knees, her hair plastered to her skin in wet clumps, watching the water rise on the other side of the glass. Condensation spread from the edges, smearing Sheppard and the room behind into fuzzy glimpses of clarity.

“Rodney,” Sheppard’s voice crackled through the radio, stretched tight to breaking, “are you--FUCK.” A dark shaped flashed in the white water before Rodney heard a hollow thump against the glass and saw the smooth seductive motion of scaled ridges through the roiling water. Sheppard clung to the top of the arch as the water on the other side of the door rose higher than Rodney’s head. 

A shiny, charcoal snout breached the water, mouth agape at Sheppard’s side. It seemed to miss Sheppard, or misunderstand, butting past him as he choked on sea water in favor of slamming its knobby head furiously against the closed door before coiling its body and shooting off towards the center of the room. 

“That one--that one was smaller,” Rodney got out, horrified, his hands momentarily still.

“There are,” a hacking cough through the radio, “three now. Like the bears--Goldilocks, you know--Oh,” faintly, “here they come again.”

Teyla moved sluggishly, pressing a flathead screwdriver into Rodney’s hand. He stared at her blankly for a second and jammed it into the seam, ripping the panel off the wall to expose the manual controls. “Working on it! I’m--just--don’t get eaten,” Rodney pleaded and jerked that one crystal a little to the left.

The door fell down, and a wall of water fell over him, slamming him against the steps with a thundering weight. He felt Teyla’s arm beneath him and then Sheppard’s bony form pressing into his ribs as water from the initial wave subsided, running back down the steps and over his face. 

“We have to--” Sheppard started, pushing himself up. A scream cut him off, thin and eerie, as high and horrible as a Wraith dart burning through the atmosphere.

“Oh my god, they SHRIEK?” Rodney yelled. Sheppard’s answering look was hollow and unsurprised, and Rodney realized they’d been doing it all along, the sound cut off by the sealed door, lost in the radio static. 

He heard a long splash, saw the wake flying up at the center of the window room while the smallest creature surfaced, leaping at its side. The middle shark. The leviathan they’d seen hanging with anticipation beneath the circle window must be waiting for the water to rise still more. At least, Rodney thought morosely, that one would never fit through the archways to the labs.

Sheppard was grabbing at him again, hissing urgently, “Get Teyla out of here!”

The big shark hit the archway, flanks scraping against the walls, immediately occupying almost the whole volume of the stairwell, water spilling over the steps onto the lab floor. Its body contorted, launching itself towards Teyla, collapsed on the highest step, half-submerged in water.

Sheppard threw himself in front of her, shouting urgently, “Rodney!” like there was something Rodney could do, and for an endless instant that made Rodney’s vision go strange and white around the edges, the shark closed its mouth around Sheppard, engulfing his torso and most of the right side of his body. Rodney’s throat seized up, and he couldn’t feel his legs. It was like he’d been the one to lose a limb, and he almost pitched forward right there.

Then the monster lifted its head, jaws opening and Sheppard slipped out, startingly whole, pale and shaking and undeniably alive, shouting at the top of his lungs, “HOLY FUCKING CHRIST!”

“Oh, oh, shit--” Rodney added weakly.

The giant shark fell back slowly--it seemed perplexed--and Rodney was almost relieved. As it cleared the doorway, the littlest shark wriggled in around the edges with a whistling cry like wind over a bottle top, arrowing again towards Teyla.

Maybe a second had passed; Sheppard was still directly in the creature’s path. He had no time to move, and he looked frozen there, like he couldn’t get up the same gung-ho spirit about selfless sacrifice the second time around, but he couldn’t figure out how to get out of the way either.

Teyla reached over Sheppard’s shoulder and slammed her closed fist down on its nose. The hit itself was ineffective, weak and poorly executed, but the shark reared up its head, and its charge went awry, writhing painfully to the side. Momentum carried its body forward into Sheppard and Teyla, shoving them bodily to the side as it tried awkwardly to reverse its motion.

“No.” Pinned beneath Sheppard, Teyla’s voice trembled with fury. “I am tired of this. Leave. My. Mind.”

Rodney stared as the startled shark shied away from, squealing with distress.

Shaken out of inaction, Rodney turned to the open wall panel and jerked the applicable crystal hard to the right. The door rose back up out of the floor, pinching the shark against the ceiling of the arch where it let out a screech, wriggling frantically backwards and vanishing upwards out of sight in the still rapidly rising waters of the window room.

“Colonel--” Teyla said.

“Sheppard!” Rodney splashed forward.

Sheppard was standing unsteadily in the middle of the steps, staring down at himself, lips parted and gasping, water dripping off his spiky hair. He ran a hand cautiously over his torso, pressing his fingers against the soaked fabric of his expedition jacket like he was expecting to find a chunk of missing flesh. “No, I’m alright, it just--nipped me.” His head jerked up. “Are you okay?”

“Which one of us?” Rodney asked.

“I don’t know,” Sheppard said sarcastically, sounding a lot less in shock than he had a second ago, “how under psychic attack do you feel, Rodney?”

“That will not happen again,” Teyla said, glowering darkly at the clear doors and the dark shapes millling beyond it.

“Hey, it’s not your fault--”

“Never again,” Teyla repeated calmly.

“Right, okay,” Sheppard said, and then as if just realizing he was still waist deep in water, splashed nervously up the steps, reaching down from comparatively dry ground to pull Rodney up. Teyla stepped out with dignity and under her own power. When Sheppard turned to watch her, clearly worried, Rodney leaned out, snatching up the datasquare floating in the flooded stairwell and putting it back in his pocket. He’d lost the Latere rifle in the confusion. Teyla’s P90 was still clipped to her vest, but neither the P90 nor the lamp attached to it were especially waterproof.

“We need to get out of here,” Sheppard said. 

“Yes, just a quick detour through solid rock, we’ll be at the surface in no time.” Rodney looked mournfully at the Ancient biolab, the racks of diagnostic equipment and the puddled floor. “Well, I suppose its nothing we don’t have on Atlantis. Probably. I mean, you never know with priceless Ancient technology--”

“Rodney.”

“Oh fine.” There were two closed doors, one on either side of the lab. Sheppard claimed they led to a circular hallway that ran the circumference of the window room, connecting all three labs back to the antechamber and the exit. Rodney pried the wall panel off near one of them, swapped two crystals, and the door slid down into the floor with a rush of cold, stale air. “Wait, wait,” Rodney said, “let it air out, so--” 

Behind him, he heard a dull banging from the direction of the door. “Can they get in?” Sheppard asked uneasily, leaning against the wall again, eyeing the flooded steps warily. Teyla had an expression on her face like Let them try.

“I could answer that question,” Rodney snapped, “If I had a week and a team of researchers to study the structural integrity. I don’t even know what that’s made of! The Ancients had a penchant for inventing new alloys using local materials, so who knows what that--” 

The Colonel narrowed his eyes.

“Uh,” Rodney trailed off. He cocked a finger at the dark hallway. “Through the door?”

“Yeah,” Sheppard agreed icily.

They jogged through, Rodney leading the way with the scanner and his waterproof flashlight while Teyla brought up the rear in the dark. There was no way Sheppard didn’t know why he was in the middle, but nobody said anything aloud. There were no doorways branching off, only the usual mosaics until they reached the closed door to the antechamber, its clear panels cool and beaded with condensation.

“Oh,” Rodney said, “I was afraid of that.”

Sheppard stared. “It’s _underwater_.”

“Yes, Colonel, remember the bit about air pressure and an open tunnel to the surface? By my calculations,” Rodney made a gesture like a parent measuring the height of a toddler, “sea level is about one or two stories up.”

Sheppard pointed insistently at the door, looking almost betrayed. “ _Underwater_ , Rodney.”

“And apparently, you’re in shock.” Rodney made a face that was supposed to be reassuring but felt more like a horrible grimace. “We can--probably hold our breath that long.” 

Sheppard stared. Rodney broke. “Okay, yes, and then the _sharks will eat us_ , fine! Nobody respects my attempts at optimism. You know why?” He made a sharp gesture with the scanner. “Because only morons don’t know how screwed they are.”

“They may not fit in the stairway,” Teyla put in. “It seemed narrow.”

“The bigger one, there’s no way,” Sheppard was nodding, “the little one--”

“--was not that little,” Rodney finished. “Still, it fit through the door at the lab easily enough.”

Sheppard opened his mouth to reply and said, “Ow,” instead, putting his hand to his stomach. Rodney flicked his flashlight beam across Sheppard’s palm, streaked with pink. Sheppard tugged down the zipper of his jacket, pulling up the hem of his black tshirt. In the white light of the flashlight, a half circle of small puncture wounds stood out starkly against his bleached out skin, bleeding sluggishly until the water ran pink, disappearing below the waistband of his boxers after curving towards a hipbone. “Wow,” Sheppard whistled, “Seriously nipped me.”

Rodney opened his mouth to yell at him for being so cavalier about his close brush with snack time-- “Wait a minute, you’re bleeding? They’re SHARKS! I’m not getting in the water with you!”

“Don’t make me hug you, Rodney,” Sheppard warned, though even in the crappy light from the flashlight, it was pretty obvious he’d gone pale at the reminder. “Even if I weren’t, they’d come straight for Teyla anyway.”

“Oh good, because having twice the imminent doom is always reassuring!”

Sheppard ignored him. “Either of you got a knife?” Teyla nodded. “Right, give it to McKay. McKay, you’re going to take our six--”

“Wait, are you serious?” Rodney pointed the flashlight at him, staring, but there was only that weird, pained look on Sheppard’s face, “Oh god, you are. My brain is the only thing between Atlantis and complete annihilation. You wave the butter knife at the sea monster.”

“McKay, I’m already going to be swimming with one arm--” Sheppard started, but the muscles along his neck were tightening, chin lifting, jaw set in rigid lines. He lifted a hand, blocking the flashlight beam. “Get that thing out of my eyes, I can’t--Okay, look, I’ll do it.”

And Rodney realized he’d fought dirty without ever meaning to. Because of course Sheppard’s martyr complex would pop up in the worst moment possible. Not that he didn’t fight dirty--fair fights were for those of lesser intellect--but usually he was pulling Simpson’s hair to get the last cup of coffee, not killing his best friend by accident.

“I--” Rodney opened his mouth to retract, but in all fairness, a momentary feeling of guilt wasn’t making _Rodney McKay_ in a knife fight with a shark any better of an idea. 

“I will do it,” Teyla said quickly.

“No, you won’t,” Sheppard told her flatly. Teyla bristled.

“I know that I was overwhelmed before--”

“You’re right,” Sheppard said. “You’re not going to fall for that again; you concentrate on that.”

She had pulled the knife out of its sheath at her waist. It lay awkwardly across her open palm. Rodney grabbed for it, holding it awkwardly in both hands in front of him, meaning it was actually pointed at Sheppard, who was staring at him in bemusement or possibly exhaustion. Rodney glared at him fiercely.

“I’m going to open the door now,” Rodney said calmly. “You’d better be holding on to something.”

Rodney gave John the flashlight, and made sure the closest safety door in the hallway was sealed behind them. Even so, the water came through like a punch in the gut from the Jolly Green Giant. They managed to haul themselves through by the door frame, and in a few more seconds, the sealed portion of the hallway was completely flooded, the powerful current more or less equalized and Rodney started counting down the seconds to when he couldn’t hold his breath anymore.

The water was startlingly clear, which shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d seen the view from the tunnels and from the window room, but he was still impressed to find himself in the middle of its glass-like clarity. It was cold all over, in his hair, in his eyes, pressed against his open eyes, moving through his clothes. He was already feeling a pressure in his chest to breathe, and every motion of his arms and legs, heavy with boots, felt completely ineffective. He was so scared, trapped and silent in the dark.

Sheppard had the flashlight, next to Teyla, who had an arm around his waist, kicking off the wall towards the staircase. Rodney hoped to god--not that he wasn’t an atheist--that he’d been right about how far they were below sea level. Otherwise, wow, this was going be an alternative timeline nightmare come to life.

He kicked off after them.

His clothes were lead weights, but the stairway was narrow, easy to push off the walls and find handholds on the decorative dead sealife as they moved upwards in their frantic search for air. Teyla and Sheppard were faster than he expected them to be, and he hurried to keep up with the small area illuminated by the flashlight in Sheppard’s hand. He was running out of air. 25 seconds? 35? He didn’t know he could hold his breath this long. 

He felt something nudge at his ankle. 

It was the little one, as expected, wider than the staircase, but not so tall, flipped sideways and curling its spine around the central column like a hermit crab in its shell. Rodney made a completely unintelligible screaming sound, bubbles exploding from his mouth.

Hands grabbed at his vest, pulling him lethargically backwards--the human body was a joke in the water--and he realized Teyla had come back for him, her expression hidden by the darkness of the stairwell. The water brightened suddenly, Sheppard’s flashlight shining back at them.

Rodney wanted to shout, Don’t you dare!

The sharks dark eye gleamed in the light, its body suddenly too immense, all-encompassing in the limited space. Then it jerked back with a shriek more eerie in the water than it could ever be on land. Rodney’s head was pounding, his lungs screaming. Teyla launched off the wall, arms around his waist.

Sheppard’s flashlight wasn’t pointing at them anymore, so maybe he would manage not to drown himself, and then the glow from the flashlight was bouncing, fragmented above him, and he realized it because it was out, Sheppard was there, and Rodney broke the surface, gasping, Sheppard giving him a hand up until all three of them were completely on dry land. 

“Up,” Sheppard managed, jerking his head gracelessy, dragging in gulping breaths.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rodney agreed, wiping water out of his eyes with both hands.

Behind him, the surface of the water trembled with the strange underwater cries of the sharks. Teyla half-turned towards the water with a snarl as from a villain whose hero just won’t die, so Rodney bent his shoulder into her stomach and picked her up and ran with her behind Sheppard up the rest of the steps, and they all collapsed in a heap on the dusty floor of the foyer.

Rodney listened to the distant shrieking of the sharks. “We decided that they can’t,” he coughed, “get up here, didn’t we?”

“Could they?” Teyla sounded horrified. “When you spoke of ‘sharks’ I did not think they were an animal that could also travel on land.”

“Oh, no,” Rodney assured her, “Earth sharks are strictly marine animals.”

“Candygram?” Sheppard asked breathlessly and laughed when Rodney reached across Teyla to smack him upside the head. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Let’s get out of here anyway.”

“How exactly?” Rodney said. “Remember the rope we let go? Meaning that we’re stranded?”

“Maybe if you start panicking hard enough, you’ll--”

The radio crackled.

“This is Lt. Egerman checking in from Atlantis,” said the radio cheerfully. “I’m looking for Colonel Sheppard’s team. How’re you guys doing?”

They all froze. Slowly, Sheppard reached up to tap his radio, sharing a look of wide-eyed disbelief with his teammates that dissolved into the helpless grin Rodney knew was mirrored on all their faces. “This is Colonel Sheppard. We could use a little--”

The veranda door slammed open, bouncing off the wall with a sharp CRACK. The Latere on the other side shared a blank look with the sodden pile of Lanteans on the floor. Behind him, Rodney could see a rope ladder held down by two Latere stretching from the edge of the veranda up and out of sight beyond the cliff, three more soldiers making their way down. 

The Latere in the doorway tightened his hands on his pistol. At that moment the sharks let out a high, carrying scream. For half a second the Latere jerked up, obvious recognition on his face, and Teyla spun around on her butt and kicked the door shut in his face. 

Rodney shouted into the radio, “DON’T CLOSE THE WORMHOLE.”

“Of--course, Dr. McKay,” Egerman said uncertainly, but Rodney was already ripping open the velcro pocket, pulling out the datasquare and shoving it towards Sheppard who scooted backwards with surprising speed for someone in that kind of shape. It skittered to a stop in front of him, backed up against the wall, legs splayed out.

“What the hell, Rodney!” he shouted while Rodney was kneeling between his knees, unfolding the black material, and--yes! All Atlantean database categories showed as accessible. His heart swelled with triumph and possibly survival. He grabbed Sheppard’s wrist, the skin cool and clammy under his fingers, but that was something to worry about later, dragging Sheppard’s hand towards the glowing category that had gotten him into so much trouble in the first place:

Puddlejumpers.

“No, really, Rodney--what the HELL is THAT DOING HERE.” Then his eyes got comically round, lips pursed in surprise, and he said, “Wait. EARLIER--”

“OH MY GOD,” Rodney shouted right back. “JUST KEEP THE SHARK FROM EATING US, OKAY? PRIORITIES.”

Whether because of actual assent or just because Rodney had distracted him, Sheppard’s arm relaxed and let Rodney drag his hand over the datasquare puddlejumper directory. He felt Sheppard’s arm go limp, which he’d kind of been hoping wouldn’t be a side effect, because Sheppard was heavy and wet and cold, and Sheppard slumped forward, head falling into the crook of Rodney’s neck.

**

In a disconnected way, John recognized the absence of sensation the second time around. It was like learning to fight or to play a sport, when all the ways you knew how to move had new and mysterious consequences, when you suddenly had to learn how to consciously control muscles you maybe weren’t even conscious of having.

Touching the datasquare felt like sitting in a black emptiness without size or shape because as soon as he touched it, _he_ didn’t have any size or shape of his own to judge his surroundings. He could feel his hand on the square, though it felt a bit like heatstroke; near and far at the same time, and thinking about it just disoriented him.

The more he thought about it, the less the empty space felt like being trapped and the more it felt like being focused. Nothing else existed but the warmth beneath his fingers, and as he turned his mind towards it, he found he knew that sensation, even focused to a point in an unfamiliar darkness. It was recognition across time and wisdom backed by unimaginable age; it was connection and knowledge and anticipation, muscles poised to spring. In other words, _Atlantis_.

John thought about where he was in the universe.

 

**

A few seconds later, when Rodney was trying to rearrange Sheppard’s chin so it wasn’t stabbing him to death, the radio started chattering at him in confusion, “Uh. Dr. McKay, we have some strange activity in the jumper bay. Dr. Weir would like to know--”

Yes! Rodney thought, squeezing Sheppard’s wrist happily (no response). He was glad for Sheppard’s warm breath against his neck, which would normally have made the whole thing unbearably awkward, but instead--well, Rodney was glad he had a reason not to associate limp, wet, and cold with corpse.

Aloud, he snapped, “Yes, yes, that’s fine. Now shut up, I’m concentrating,” which wasn’t entirely a lie because somebody had to make sure Sheppard stayed in contact with the datasquare. Since it was Rodney’s neck Sheppard was breathing on--and Teyla was busy barricading the veranda door with her body--it might as well be Rodney.

Something thumped at the door. It was a tentative thump, like the thumper wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to get at what was inside. Teyla planted her feet on the floor and pushed her back against the door with a little more force.

**

The universe expanded. 

HUDs of systems diagnostics and command menus carved out niches for themselves in what had previously been a dimensionless space, spreading through the black faster than the pennies John used to drop off the tops of Ferris wheels--or no, maybe it wasn’t fast at all. Sometimes the whole mass of information seemed to unfold with glacial slowness because no matter how much there was, John caught every thought and figure as though the datasquare were etching the information directly onto the surface of his brain.

According to the database, there were sixteen puddlejumpers registered for immediate use in the bay above the gateroom. John had only ever seen eight. Distantly, he wondered where the rest of them were, if there were other hangers throughout the city, but it didn’t seem very important.

When he logged onto the operating system in the jumper bay, one of the puddlejumpers began to power up even before he got around to sending the command to do so. He was not surprised to find that it was Jumper One. John knew he played favorites.

More data files opened against the black in response to his absent query, and he stopped wondering. Perhaps he hadn’t known about the evolving circuit design employed in the ATA interface in most small to medium spacecraft (intended to allow ship and pilot to continuously improve efficiency even in the absence of technicians with the necessary expertise) but in retrospect, it made a great deal of sense.

With half a thought, the schematics of the system were bullying their way to center stage, and John nearly lost himself in a century of study results and scholarly papers chronicling success, as well as the rise of a startling new mental disorder peculiar to ATA pilots--

The comm in the gateroom announced, “External access to the database! Dr. Zelenka--!”

The comm in the second engineering lab barked, “Jumper Bay!” accompanied by a stream of language John would later recognize as Czech. 

The square couldn’t identify the location of the third communication, but the gate registered as active, and John knew that voice, for all it was tinny and illogically far away: “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.”

Life signs approached Jumper One as John initiated the autopilot routine to take it through the floor hatch into the gate room and through the wormhole. Absently, he flipped the alarms in the bay, signaling the ground crew always on duty to remove the endangered civilians.

When nothing happened, John sorted back through the data from the square and realized the alarm system had been shut down in the Ancients final flight from Atlantis and that the ground crew he’d been signaling was part of VOLSS--the Volunteer Organization of Lantean Science and Service--all of whom were either dead or ascended ten thousand years ago.

He also realized that since 1) even the smallest fragment of any of this information would have sent either Rodney or Elizabeth into convulsions of joy and 2) he’d never heard any of it before in his life, everything the datasquare was showing had to still be buried in untranslated portions of the database.

Meaning it was in Ancient.

John was--in a distant, unconcerned way--pretty glad he felt so disconnected from his emotions in here. Otherwise that would probably creep him the fuck out.

The unidentified comm signal muttered angrily, “You moron, let the reinforcements into the jumper,” probably without realizing he was broadcasting, and John thought, Oh right.

**

It turned out the new personnel from the Daedalus weren’t as stupid as Rodney had been preaching because as soon as something external accessed the Atlantis database, someone called Zelenka who shouted, “Jumper Bay!” and also a lot of stuff in Czech, and the new Major--Lauren?--managed to tumble a whole team of marines armed with stunners into Jumper One before it got off the ground and Sheppard piloted it through the wormhole.

Rodney sat on the floor of the Ancient foyer, listening to the eerie cry of giant, alien predators and sharing loaded, serious looks with another alien predator (this one on his team). Occasionally, he reached up to shove at the body of a USAF Lt. Colonel who recently seemed to have nothing better to do than be unconscious all over Rodney.

Rodney said airily into the radio--because he really wasn’t worried--“So, how long do you think?”

“From the size of the island, I’d say a five minute jumper ride,” said Major Loraine’s dry voice.

“He’s still piloting?” Rodney asked, mildly surprised. “I thought once he arranged the course heading--”

“I don’t drive this fast,” was the Major’s answer. 

They got there in two actually. Rodney heard the stunner blasts through the door and the stuttered reports of Laterian weapons returning fire. Another minute and the sound of weapons fire died away. Someone knocked on the door.

“Sorry,” Rodney shouted, “we’ve already had the landshark joke!”

“Too bad!” shouted the someone on the other side. “Your pizza’s getting cold!”

Teyla looked at Rodney, who--after a moment of complete surprise--managed to nod his approval, and she sagged forward, boneless with relief, so convincing that Rodney almost thought she’d skipped off with Sheppard to control spaceships with her mind.

“We’ve got the jumper hovering on auto-pilot, Dr. McKay,” said the Marine standing over him. “Do you--” Rodney realized the kid was trying really hard not to stare, “do you need medical attention?”

“No, no immediate--” and Rodney stopped. “Wait, I have no idea.” He pulled the datasquare carefully from Sheppard’s hands, folding it and putting it away. He supposed he hoped that Sheppard would conveniently forget the source of his new magical touch with Ancient technology if the datasquare was out of sight when he woke up, but it didn’t seem that important anymore.

Footsteps, and then Teyla was crouching next to them, putting her hand lightly on Sheppard’s shoulder.

The Marine turned around and barked, “We need the stretcher!”

“No, wait!” Rodney snapped. “He’s going to wake up on his own. Just--wait.”

Rodney still had his hand around Sheppard’s wrist, so he was the one who noticed first. Sheppard’s fingers tightened, curling down until they brushed Rodney’s knuckle. Teyla was the second because she had her hand on the wrong shoulder and Sheppard said, “Ow, goddamnit.” Teyla smiled so brightly Rodney thought it was entirely due to luck that she remembered not to squeeze harder.

Then Sheppard looked up and demanded, “Nicholson, why the hell are we still here?”

Nicholson said, “Sir, yes, sir!” and they got the fuck out of there.

There were four stunned Latere outside. Rodney picked his way over the bodies while the marines helped Colonel Sheppard into the jumper and Teyla hopped in after him. The Marine in the pilot’s chair said cheekily, “Nice flying, sir!” but there was real awe in voice. Rodney didn’t even try to claim credit for his part in any of it.

He sank onto one of the benches, wanting nothing more to do with this mission except to be chauffeured home. Two marines dropped Sheppard onto the bench next to him where he sagged sideways into Rodney’s shoulder, head dipping with fatigue, and something in Rodney’s chest hurt, maybe a splinter, until Sheppard hissed dangerously, “So--mysterious fainting spell, huh.”

Rodney said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and wondered if Zelenka would say something nice about him at his funeral. Major Lucy gave a thumbs up to the front of the jumper, and the awe-struck Marine flew them back to Atlantis while Teyla used the five minute flight to pass out on the other bench.

**  
Sheppard and Teyla both got an overnight stay in the infirmary. Rodney got to escape and sleep in until noon. He hadn’t planned that, actually. There’d definitely been a whole slot from midnight to 3:00 a.m. tentatively devoted to going to labs to make sure Zelenka knew _just how right he’d been_ about the capabilites of the Ancient datasquare. Instead he woke up at 11:43 a.m. face down with wrinkle impressions on his cheek, piled under two extra blankets and not wearing any clothes.

Sheppard hadn’t snuck in and killed in him his sleep either, which he supposed was a good thing. Rodney put “Think of a good answer to ‘What the hell?’ ASAP,” at the top of his mental to-do list, and staggered into the bathroom. 

Elizabeth called while he was still in the shower to say that Sheppard and Teyla had both been pronounced fit for debriefing, though Sheppard’s shoulder would keep him this side of the gate for at least the next two weeks. Rodney pulled on clean clothes, put on his muddy boots, and started over, pushing through an unexpectedly large crowd to reach the conference room where Sheppard was already lounging in a chair by the far wall, arm in a sling and white gauze wrapped around his wrist.

Apparently--Sheppard informed him from across the room when Rodney hesitated--the rumors about the giant mind-reading Wraith sharks had made the rounds (he threw a smile to the crowd and got some intermittent laughter). The crowd was celebrating a still well-remembered time when chaos and farce among offworld teams had been the closest thing to a new summer blockbuster.

“I’ve turned into an attraction at a Carnival sideshow,” Rodney protested, cautiously choosing the chair next to Sheppard and shooting death glares at the open doors, stuffed with chattering gawkers. Sheppard was right though; none of the people hanging around were new Daedalus personnel.

“Welcome to my life after I sat in that damn chair,” Sheppard whispered back unsympathetically, picking sulkily at the sling on his right arm.

“They weren’t really mind- _reading_ sharks, right? Because that could be--” Rodney couldn’t think of words to describe the bad, and just flailed his hands in what he hoped was an enlightening maneuver.

Sheppard shrugged with one shoulder. It should have looked a lot more awkward than it did. “Teyla said not.”

“Like she would know.”

“I believe her.”

“You would believe her if she said the moon was made out of cheese!” Rodney retorted a little louder than he’d intended.

Sheppard looked casually over at the doors where a majority of the onlookers were shamelessly eavesdropping. He turned back to Rodney, asking innocently, “The moon is made out of cheese?”

Rodney didn’t have to think of a reply because at that point Elizabeth showed up, excusing her way through the crowd. Teyla came in behind her, dropping into the chair next to Rodney. A full night’s sleep had done wonders, but there was still a hint of shadows under her eyes.

“We were just talking about you,” Sheppard told her amiably, and Rodney glared at him. Teyla nodded politely, obviously not paying attention.

“So, Gentleman. Teyla,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “We’re glad to have you back safe.”

Rodney nodded, reaching into the dry backpack he’d brought with him and unfolding the datasquare across the table. It came to life eagerly beneath his hands, but he was careful not to touch any of the directories. He said flatly, “It’s not just a portable database terminal.” 

And launched into an explanation of the observed effects. He couldn’t manage to sound half as smug as he deserved to sound though, not when he was spending most of his concentration trying not to look at Sheppard.

Zelenka came in late halfway through Rodney’s lecture--in fact he wasn’t really supposed to be there at all--ducking through the people hanging around the door, almost running into the table before he stumbled to a stop, tapping his fingers on the surface and forgetting entirely to sit down. Rodney assumed he’d come as soon as Kavanagh had told him about the tests Rodney had stopped by the lab to run before the briefing. 

Rodney ignored him for now. He stressed to Elizabeth that unless they had plans to force the issue, the gate address should be removed from the list of active destinations due to the Latere’s strong isolationist policy during cullings. The only real discovery on the planet, he said, was the cache of Ancient genetic research in the cliffside facility. He admitted he hadn’t been able to bring back a hard copy of the data, but they could probably retrieve some of it on a return mission without having to go anywhere near the sharks if they used the datasquare. Elizabeth vetoed that immediately, citing Rodney’s earlier reasons for letting the Latere be.

“Oh, please,” Rodney snapped. “I just never want to speak to them again. I have no problems stealing their wealth of Ancient technology. Did we tell you about the tunnels--”

He gave her the bullet points, including his escape from Latere hands after he’d been separated from Sheppard. Towards the end, he even tossed in a few tidbits about their heroic struggles in the flooding Ancient facility for the benefit of their rapt audience. 

It was all going beautifully--quite concisely too--and Radek was pratically bouncing in the background, when Elizabeth leaned forward, clasping her hands on the table and said, “Tell me again how you and Sheppard were captured?”

Sheppard spun his chair lazily, smiling slow and sharp like a knife. “Yeah, Rodney,” he said easily. He told Elizabeth in a conspiratory whisper, “I was passed out for this part.”

Elizabeth frowned. “Did Carson--”

“No, it’s kind of mysterious actually.” Sheppard beamed at her. Rodney knew doom when he saw it.

“Forget that! It is not important!” Radek interrupted irritably. Sheppard and Elizabeth both turned around to stare at him. “Where is it, Rodney? Or I will make your life living hell.”

“Oh, oh, right,” Rodney said gratefully, digging in his pack, “hey, look at this--” and pulled out a ZPM.

Elizabeth’s eyes went round, and Sheppard made a strangled noise, face turning red. Even Teyla was gaping at him. There were some gasps from the people at the doors, and he swore he heard somebody _squeak_.

“There! You see!” Radek crowed triumphantly.

“It’s broken!” Rodney protested. “Didn’t I say that? It’s broken. I tested it a few minutes ago--”

“I know it is broken, you hoarding oaf!” Radek shook his small, angry fist. “Think! The research opportunity presented by a malfunctioning rather than depleted Zero Point Module--”

“Well, yes, _obviously!_ ” Rodney snapped right back.

“RODNEY,” Sheppard said, and everybody shut up. Elizabeth was blinking at both of them from across the table, palms flat against the tabletop. Sheppard turned back to Rodney, forgetting to appear threatening. His expression was open and completely confused, staring at the ZPM in Rodney’s hands. “Where the hell did you get that thing?”

“It was under the lab bench at the outpost.” Rodney put the ZPM on the table. “I found it right before the shark showed up to try to eat Teyla.”

“You did not think to _mention_ it?” Teyla asked incredulously.

“Power readings suggested it was unusable. Also, Sheppard got eaten by a shark! I was distracted.”

“I was not eaten by a shark--”

“As if being _nibbled_ by a shark is any less traumatizing--”

“What, for you?” Sheppard said sarcastically.

“Yes!” Rodney shouted and his voice broke and his eyes pricked and Sheppard stared at him and oh god, this was the worst day ever. He felt fingers brush against the back of his wrist and realized Teyla was holding his hand under the table. 

“Sergeant,” Elizabeth said calmly to the Marine at the entrance, who turned and began to close the conference room doors, herding the audience out and away, including a loudly protesting Zelenka.

When the doors were closed, she repeated, “Rodney, how were you and Colonel Sheppard captured?”

Rodney swallowed nervously and completely embarrassed himself forever by gripping Teyla’s hand fiercely under the table. It only made it a little better that she gripped back. 

Before Rodney could speak, Sheppard said quietly, “We were cut off from the stargate after the Latere figured out we had a pretty good shot at their Achilles heel. Rodney thought the square might be good for something other than a readme file, but I hadn’t figured out how to use it yet, so it knocked me out instead. They caught up to us while I was out cold.”

Rodney stared at him. Elizabeth said carefully, “Rodney--”

“Yes,” Rodney said quickly. “That’s it. That’s--what happened.”

“You can read about it in our reports,” Sheppard said in such a neutral tone of voice that Rodney had a sudden glimpse of Sheppard driving all his commanding officers up the wall. 

Elizabeth’s gaze darted to Teyla’s blank face, and for a moment, her expression was something like a grimace. Rodney felt a surge of _something_ suffuse his chest, and he almost wanted to cheer because--he didn’t know. His team--he just--did.

That was when Sheppard said, “Also, I think that thing taught me how to speak Ancient,” and the debriefing dissolved into something else entirely, which could be better termed ‘the entire science team attempts to molest Sheppard at once’.

In the middle of the frenzy, Sheppard leaned over and said, “You’d better finish up. Your appointment with Heightmeyer is in twenty seven minutes.”

Rodney blinked. “What appointment with Heightmeyer? All of mine are already--um.”

“The appointment with Heightmeyer that all team members get when they'd rather be captured by the enemy than walk to the gate by themselves,” Sheppard said in his patient drawl, but with none of the hostility he’d had at the beginning of the debriefing.

“I--I wasn’t worried about me,” Rodney said in a rush.

Sheppard did a weird thing where he stared at the ground and looked a little sheepish. “Yeah--you said that.” He looked up, eyes narrowed. “Also, if you haven’t handed that thing--both those things--over to Zelenka by tomorrow? No blue Jell-O. For a month.”

“What!” Rodney spluttered. “You! You can’t! Where does Jell-O fall in your chain of command!”

A few feet away, one of the linguists leapt to her feet with a shout, bobbed hair in disarray, and bent over to scribble furiously on a notepad. Her three cohorts started babbling, gesturing at the tablet with the data Sheppard had dictated from his brief stay in the Atlantis mainframe.

“Hey, hey,” Rodney protested when they started getting grabby, fingers reaching for Sheppard’s sleeves.

“Oh, oh,” said whatsherface, looking at Sheppard with huge eyes the way some people look at abandoned puppies. She gestured at the datasquare, lying inert and dark on the table next to her notes. “You see--it says--”

And she explained. Turned out that the ‘peculiar mental disorder’ John had seen mentioned in the database that showed up in twelve percent of ATA jumper pilots was actually schizophrenia--previously unknown to the Ancients, apparently--and Carson grounded everybody until Rodney figured out how to set the jumper systems back to default and disable the evolving circuit system. 

Sheppard hovered over Rodney’s shoulder the entire time, justifying now and forever any comparisons to sad, fuzzy animals, but Rodney didn’t mind. Because there was no better way to make John Sheppard like you again than by giving him a bay full of puddlejumpers for his birthday.

(Even if they were already his and you were just giving them back).


End file.
